Looks like Twitter CEO Elon Musk’s power trip is far from over. After his tweet about the Super Bowl flopped, the business magnate ordered engineers to create a new system that would boost his tweets above all.
During the 57th Super Bowl game, US President Joe Biden retweeted a video of First Lady Jill Biden showing support for the Eagles. The tweet garnered 29 million impressions, while Musk’s tweet about the game gained 9 million. Musk also tweeted in support of the Eagles, but deleted his tweet four hours later.
James Musk, the CEO’s cousin requested any and all engineers respond to address the discrepancy in engagement, which he described as “high urgency”.
Musk then allegedly ordered 80 engineers to work on a Sunday night, and threatened to fire them if they did not “fix the issue”. He also apparently flew overnight to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team in person.
The engineers worked tirelessly overnight to keep their jobs intact, testing possible solutions to why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should.
By Monday morning, Musk’s tweets flooded everyone’s timelines, regardless of whether or not they followed him. Twitter engineers worked through the night to create a system that allowed Musk to receive increased promotion on his tweets above other users “by a factor of 1,000”.
Engineers created new code that automatically “greenlights” all of Musk’s tweets. This allows them to bypass Twitter filters that would traditionally keep one particular account from flooding the entire feed. This absurd turn of events comes only a week after he reportedly fired one of his top engineers after the employee suggested that his waning engagement was due to declining public interest in Musk himself.
Twitter employees are terrified of losing their jobs. They spend most of their time pandering to the CEO’s obsession with engagement rather than actually enhancing the platform.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023
And Musk clearly doesn’t care how the public perceives these incidents. He continues to tweet memes about them.
