Elon Musk fires Twitter engineer over his dropping reach

SAN FRANCISCO: Twitter CEO Elon Musk has fired the company’s top engineer because of his declining reach, the media reported.

Musk, last week, kept his account private for one day to see whether that would increase the amount of his audience, reports The Verge.

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

In search of answers, Musk on Tuesday gathered a team of engineers and advisors in a room at Twitter’s headquarters.

“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to numerous 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,” the report mentioned.

Employees showed Musk internal data related to the engagement with his account along with a Google Trends chart.

In April last year, they informed him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.”

However, now, he is at a score of nine. Engineers previously looked at whether Musk’s reach had been purposely limited, but they couldn’t find any proof that the algorithm was biased against him.

Musk did not take the news well and told the engineer, “You’re fired, you’re fired.”

According to a current employee, Musk has told employees to keep track of how frequently each of his tweets is recommended since he is dissatisfied with the engineers’ current work.

Meanwhile, the micro-blogging platform on Thursday faced a global outage, including in India, and it seems like an employee had deleted data for an internal service that sets rate limits for using Twitter.

The team that worked on that service left the company in November last year, the report said.