What Elon Musk likes is for people to talk about him and not go unnoticed, in short, to be the center of attention, and his actions
are consistent with his wishes
.
In the last few hours he fired one of the most important engineers on the platform, because he informed him that his popularity was declining
on his own social network.
This was advanced by
Platformer
, a technological site with great infiltration into the inner life of Twitter and which has the best
intramural information of this company.
The “you are fired” occurred live and direct, in the course of a meeting that Elon Musk called on Tuesday with his team of engineers.
The issue at hand was addressing the
number of views of his tweets
from him, in a deep downward spiral in recent months, which, for the owner, was absolutely impossible.
Elon Musk has 180 million users on Twitter. Photo: AFP.
This concern about how many people saw his tweets had already been expressed by the self-proclaimed
"chief tweeter"
in previous days.
The company's chief executive
made his account private
last week for a day to test whether that could increase his audience size.
The experiment came after several prominent right-wing users complained that recent changes to Twitter had reduced the
impact
of their accounts.
In this way, Elon Musk assigned a group of employees to review whether, in his specific case, the scope of his account had been restricted due to issues of the Twitter algorithm.
"This is ridiculous," he told the workers present at the meeting on Tuesday, always from Platformer, which cited several sources with direct knowledge of the meeting.
“
I have over a hundred million followers
and I only get a few tens of thousands of impressions,” he lamented.
The employees showed internal data and charts from Google on trends indicating that public interest in the millionaire and founder of Tesla or Space X
was fading
.
These showed that his popularity shot up to the maximum last April, a moment that coincides with the offer he presented for the purchase of Twitter.
In a quantified way, he climbed to 100 then and then plunged to 9.
When one of the engineers claimed that it was all because Musk's popularity could be declining due
to a lack of public interest
after the purchase of the social network was executed, the boss replied that he was fired, according to Platformer.
He also ordered employees to
track how often their tweets are recommended
on the site, demonstrating their dissatisfaction with the engineers' work and their lack of conviction in the point of view expressed in the technical meeting.
Elon Musk and layoffs on Twitter
Twitter suffers from the loss of engineers due to the temper of its CEO, Elon Musk.
Photo: AP.
It is not the first time that the South African tycoon has ordered the termination of valuable human resources without extenuating circumstances.
In fact, he fired three engineers who criticized him on social media just weeks after the
$44 billion acquisition closed in late October.
But his plan to reduce the permanent workforce of the social network aims for a much larger number.
A few weeks after taking office, Elon Musk ordered the sending of an internal communication addressed to his employees so that they would not go to the offices, since they were going to be "temporarily closed" and "all access credentials" were suspended.
"In an effort to set Twitter on a healthy course, we will begin the difficult process of reducing our global workforce," the company-wide email warned late Thursday.
Although there are no official figures, The Washington Post and The New York Times reported last November that those affected are close to half of the
platform's
7,500 employees .
The use of Twitter has decreased by around 10% since the billionaire took full control of the platform, which is partly attributed to multiple malfunctions.
The most notorious last one was registered this Wednesday, which
left users without the ability to send or receive messages
while the company tried to introduce various new features.
With information from La Vanguardia
look too
Twitter had problems around the world: users received a "tweet limit reached" message
Elon Musk's first step to turn Twitter into a "superapp": integrate a payment platform