Musk fires engineer after his Twitter reach goes down

Elon Musk has reportedly been worried about his tweets' visibility for some weeks. Last week, the Twitter CEO even tried a day of making his account private to see whether that would increase the amount of his audience. 

The action was taken in response to complaints from many well-known right-wing accounts with whom Musk communicates that Twitter's recent adjustments have decreased their reach.

In search of solutions on Tuesday, Musk summoned a team of engineers and consultants to a room at Twitter's headquarters and asked why his engagement rate was plummeting, The Verge reported.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting, as per the outlet. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the company's two surviving senior engineers gave a potential explanation for Musk's dwindling influence: the public's interest in the Tesla CEO's antics is waning just over a year after his stunning attempt to buy Twitter for $44 billion.

'You're fired'

Employees displayed a Google Trends chart and internal data about Musk's account engagement. They informed him that, as indicated by a score of "100," Musk reached "peak" popularity in search rankings in April of last year. He now has a score of nine. 

Musk's reach may have been artificially biased in the past, but engineers looked into this possibility and found no proof that the algorithm was prejudiced against him.

Reportedly, the billionaire did not take the news well.

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer.

According to a current employee, Musk has told staff to keep track of how frequently each of his tweets is recommended since he is dissatisfied with the engineers' present performance.

Seven weeks have passed since Twitter provided public view numbers for each tweet. At the time, Musk stated that the function will let people throughout the world understand how vibrant the platform is.

“Shows how much more alive Twitter is than it may seem, as over 90% of Twitter users read, but don’t tweet, reply or like, as those are public actions,” he tweeted.

However, almost two months later, view counts have had the opposite impact, highlighting how little engagement most postings receive in comparison to the size of their readership. At the same time, recent research found that since Musk took over, Twitter usage in the United States has decreased by almost 9%.

According to Twitter sources, the view count feature may be to blame for the fall in engagement and consequently, views. To make room for the view display, the like and retweet buttons were shrunk, making them more difficult to press.

Twitter's increasingly buggy product, which has confused users with its disappearing mentions, fluctuating algorithmic priorities, and tweets inserted apparently at random from accounts they don't follow, is an even more clear cause of the fall in engagement. 

The website experienced one of its first significant disruptions on Wednesday since Musk took leadership, and customers were puzzlingly informed that they had exceeded the daily limit for sending tweets.