Elon Musk axed an X engineer after they told the emperor why his posts were flopping, a new book claims. Via Daily Beast:
Journalist Jacob Silverman revealed in his new book Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley that Musk became fixated on how people interacted with his posts following his $44 billion acquisition of Twitter.
“Firing more than half of Twitter employees, Musk transformed how the platform operated,” Silverman writes in an excerpt obtained by Newsweek about the mass layoffs that occurred after the tech billionaire’s 2022 Twitter takeover.
Silverman then details a 2023 firing reported at the time by the tech news site Platformer.
“He fired a company engineer who told him that engagement on his tweets was down because people weren’t as interested in him,” Silverman writes.
The original report described how Musk gathered engineers and advisers at Twitter’s headquarters in 2023, where multiple sources recalled him saying: “This is ridiculous... I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
“One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach,” Platformer reported, withholding the engineer’s name due to the harassment Musk directed at former employees.
According to the publication, employees presented Musk with internal data and a Google Trends chart showing his popularity had fallen from a peak score of 100 to just nine. Musk then reportedly told the engineer, “You’re fired, you’re fired.”
Guess he forgot he was adding people as followers without their permission to make himself look more popular! Neener, neener, neener!
Elon reminds me so much of Francis in Peewee's Big Adventure:
