Elon Musk axed an X engineer after they delivered the harsh truth about why his posts were flopping, a new book claims.
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.”
In his new book, Silverman cites an example—also reported at the time by Platformer—recounting the 2023 Super Bowl, when both then-President Joe Biden and Musk tweeted their support for the Philadelphia Eagles, with Biden’s post generating nearly 20 million more impressions.
“That apparently was unacceptable to Musk, who deleted his tweet and flew to California after the game to demand changes to Twitter’s algorithm,” Silverman writes.
Silverman then quotes an alleged 2:36 a.m. Slack message from Musk’s cousin James Musk after the Super Bowl fiasco, which read: “We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform. Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”
“Thanks to the middle-of-the-night participation of 80 company engineers, the ‘high urgency’ issue was quickly solved,” Silverman writes, detailing the changes made that ensured “Twitter’s systems to privilege Musk’s posts above all others.”
“The For You feed became a mirror of Musk’s interests, containing the right-wing accounts he followed,” Silverman writes.
The author of the original Platformer article, which detailed the operation to change the X (formerly Twitter) algorithm, had been called out by Musk on X following its publication.
“The “source” of the bogus Platformer article is a disgruntled employee who had been on paid time off for months, had already accepted a job at Google and felt the need to poison the well on the way out. Twitter will be taking legal action against him,” Musk posted on X in response.
“All my sources for the story were current Twitter employees,” Zoe Schiffer, the author of the Platformer story, wrote about her sources after Musk’s threat.
