Elon Musk Throws A Shit Fit And Fires Engineer Because Not Enough People Are Viewing His Personal Tweets

Failures

from the little-sensitive-elon dept

There’s a school of thought among some who believe that the sole reason why Elon Musk bought Twitter was because of a gaping void in his soul and a deep-seeded need to be loved and adored by everyone, with the belief that he could do that better if he ran Twitter, and without the fear of having any of his tweets — or my goodness — his entire account suspended. A friend of mine has sometimes referred to this phenomenon as “cancelled man syndrome,” which is a condition in which extremely powerful people are so afraid that they might, at some point, face some consequences for their actions, that they build this entire fantasy world around “cancel culture” and “woke ideologues” coming to get them.

Under this theory, a big part of the reason why Musk bought Twitter was (1) to protect his account from any sort of reprisal and (2) to continue to fill that void, by showing up as the grand liberator, to be loved and adored.

I’m still not convinced I believe this theory. But, as more and more news comes out, it at least adds some additional evidence in support of it. The latest is from the always excellent Platformer News, where Zoe Schiffer and Casey Newton have quite a scoop concerning Musk throwing an absolute shit fit because his tweets are getting less engagement than in the past, and even firing one of the only two remaining principal engineers at the company, after they suggested maybe people were just kinda tired of all the Elon stuff:

On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “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: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.  

Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well. 

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

I mean, Musk has a well known reputation of “rage firing” people for telling him stuff he doesn’t want to hear. A few years back there was a story of him randomly rage firing an engineer at Tesla’s Gigafactory after Musk saw something that didn’t work right. And even though the engineer had nothing to do with the broken system, he was the nearest person to Musk, and he asked Musk to clarify what he was angry about, so he got fired. The story in that article sounds quite similar to the one in the Platformer piece. Musk hears something he doesn’t like, and fires someone on the spot.

But the piece doesn’t end there. It talks about the morale (uh, low) at Twitter:

“We haven’t seen much in the way of longer term, cogent strategy,” one employee said. “Most of our time is dedicated to three main areas: putting out fires (mostly caused by firing the wrong people and trying to recover from that), performing impossible tasks, and ‘improving efficiency’ without clear guidelines of what the expected end results are. We mostly move from dumpster fire to dumpster fire, from my perspective.”

Musk’s product feedback, which comes largely from replies to his tweets, often baffles his workers. 

“There’s times he’s just awake late at night and says all sorts of things that don’t make sense,” one employee said. “And then he’ll come to us and be like, ‘this one person says they can’t do this one thing on the platform,’ and then we have to run around chasing some outlier use case for one person. It doesn’t make any sense.”

The San Francisco headquarters, whose landlord has sued Twitter for nonpayment of rent, has a melancholy air. When people pass each other in the halls, we’re told that the standard greeting is “where are you interviewing?” and “where do you have offers?”

And, for people who are relying on a Twitter job for important reasons, it puts them in a quandry:

“When you’re asked a question, you run it through your head and say ‘what is the least fireable response I can have to this right now?’” one employee explained.

Also, Musk’s obsession with his own stats is just all kinds of pathetic.

Dissatisfied with engineers’ work so far, Musk has instructed employees to track how many times each of his tweets are recommended, according to one current worker.

Then there’s this, which maybe explains the extended tech outages and problems we’ve seen on Twitter this week:

“As the adage goes, ‘you ship your org chart,’” said one current employee. “It’s chaos here right now, so we’re shipping chaos.”

There are so, so, so many other stories in this article, you should go read the whole thing. However, I will leave you with one more. We were among the first to point out that the FTC’s consent decrees with Twitter are kinda important, and it seems like Musk was (1) unaware of them, and (2) didn’t care once he found out. As the article notes… the time may be running out on that attitude:

Since Musk took over, those steps have become an afterthought, employees said. “His stance is basically ‘fuck you regulators,’” we’re told. 

The FTC plans to audit the company this quarter, we’re told, and employees have doubts that Twitter has the necessary documentation in place to pass inspection. “FTC compliance is concerning,” one says. 

That’ll be fun.

Anyway, go read the whole thing, as it’s a stunning piece of reporting on what Twitter is like these days.

Filed Under: elon musk, engagement, firing, views
Companies: twitter