'You’re fired, you’re fired' | Musk sacks top engineer after his reach drops: report

Twitter CEO Elon Musk seems to be having sleepless nights for weeks now, as worries consume him about his declining reach on his micro-blogging site.

Musk, last week, changed his Twitter account's setting to private to see if that might boost the number of his audience.

The step was taken after many prominent right-wing accounts complained that their reach has reduced after the recent changes incorporated into Twitter.

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As per a report published by The Verge, a group of advisors and engineers were asked to assemble in a room at the headquarters of Twitter to find answers to the question that has been bothering him lately - “Why are his engagement numbers tanking?”

The report claims in the meeting, Musk said, “This is ridiculous. I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the principal engineers of the company said that the declining reach can be a result of waning public interest in Musk's antics.

The internal data of the account's engagement and a Google Trends chart were shared with Musk by the employees. Last April, Musk was told that he is at the “peak” of his popularity in search rankings, which was reflected in his score of “100.”

Today, Musk stands at a score of nine. Previously, engineers had investigated if the engagement of the account is being artificially restricted, however, no evidence was found that claimed that algorithm was biased against Musk.

The news did not go down well with Musk, who told the engineer, “You’re fired, you’re fired”.

As per a current worker, Musk has asked employees to track the number of times each of his tweets is recommended, the report stated.

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Seven weeks have passed since public view counts have been added to Twitter for every tweet. When the feature was introduced, Musk had promised that this would world understand how vibrant is the social media platform.

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

Now two months later, the view counts have given the exact opposite of what was expected out of it and have emphasised on how most posts get very little engagement in comparison to their audience size.

(With inputs from agencies)

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