Musk threatens to fire Twitter engineers as Biden gets more engagement on tweets than him

Twitter CEO and tech billionaire Elon Musk reportedly threatened to fire several of the social media platform's engineers after his tweets received less engagement on Super Bowl as compared to US President Joe Biden's tweet about the event. The Platformer reported that Musk got 80 of his employees to build a sytstem so that his tweets would be viewed more. It was reported that Musk's Super bowl tweet got nine million impressions as compared to Biden’s which got 29 million.

As your president, I’m not picking favorites.

But as Jill Biden’s husband, fly Eagles, fly. https://t.co/YtgaEC83Qj

— President Biden (@POTUS) February 13, 2023

The report said that on Monday, James Musk, Elon Musk's cousin summoned Twitter's engineers to “help solve” the “high urgency problem” of Musk’s low engagement. After the Super Bowl concluded, Musk flew his jet to California to confront his team and demaded they fix the issue. Eighty engineers were pulled in for the project and worked to “investigate various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should” and to test solutions, per the report.

By Monday afternoon, engineers were able to send out a code that would allow Musk’s tweets to bypass the algorithm and boost his posts by a factor of 1,000 by using a tool called the “power user multiplier”, which only has been applied to Musk, the Paltformer report said.

On Tuesday, Musk tested out the feature and posted a “forced to drink milk” meme in which “Elon’s tweets” were forcibly fed to “Twitter”. As of now, the milk meme tweet has nearly 161 million views and 1.4 million likes.

pic.twitter.com/iZUukCVrl5

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023

Later that morning, Musk seemed to acknowledged the boost in his tweets’ views and wrote: “Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm,'” he wrote.

Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… “algorithm”

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023

“He bought the company, made a point of showcasing what he believed was broken and manipulated under previous management, then turns around and manipulates the platform to force engagement on all users to hear only his voice,” a current Twitter employee told Platformer. “I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here,” he added. 

Musk fires leading Twitter engineer

Several weeks back, the Tesla CEO fired a leading Twitter engineer who reportedly told Musk that engagement on his page had declined because the interest in him had dwindled. According to a Platformer report published last Thursday, Musk convened some of what little staff he had left at the company and demanded to know why his tweets were underperforming.

“This is ridiculous,” he reportedly said in a Tuesday meeting last week. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions,” he added. “You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk allegedly told the top engineer who had offered this narrative.