Twitter owner and CEO Elon Musk went on a rampage when he noticed his Twitter reach dropping and fewer people were engaging with his tweets.
According to Verge.com, Musk called his engineers and advisors into a meeting to find out why his views and engagement numbers were nosediving.
“This is ridiculous,” he said. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
Musk held the meeting after interacting with popular conservative Twitter users who told him their reach and engagement numbers were also tanking since he purchased Twitter for $44 billion last year.
Shortly after taking over the company, Musk swiftly fired 7,500 employees, including top executives and engineers who controlled the app’s algorithms.
Twitter’s algorithms determine the number, quality and quantity of tweets you see on your timeline. It’s not organic, meaning the tweets you see are curated for you by an algorithm that determines what it wants you to see.
Before the algorithms were put into place a decade ago, users saw more reach and a more diverse variety of tweets on their timelines.
When Musk took over, he made Twitter worse by charging $8 a month for the coveted blue checkmark that verified celebrities and other VIPs from common users. Now, any user with $8 a month to spare can be “verified.”
Popular Twitter accounts have asked Musk to remove the algorithms for a better Twitter experience. But he can’t remove the algorithm since he’s charging people to artificially boost their reach.
One of two remaining Twitter engineers who attended the meeting attempted to explain to Musk that his changes are driving users away from Twitter — which is why his numbers are tanking.
Twitter usage in the U.S. has declined almost 9 percent since Musk’s takeover, according to one recent study.
Employees showed Musk internal data and a Google trends chart dating back to April 2022. They told him he was at “peak popularity” in search rankings in April, as indicated by a score of “100.”
They said his score had plummeted from 100 to a dismal 9 in just under a year. They also found no evidence that Twitter’s algorithm was biased against him.
That was not what Musk wanted to hear. He promptly fired one of his top engineers on the spot: “You’re fired, you’re fired!” he reportedly said.
On Wednesday, Twitter suffered one of its first major outages since Musk took over. Users saw a message that read, “You are over the daily limit for sending tweets.”
The hashtags #TwitterDown and #RIPTwitter briefly trended when Twitter’s service was restored.
