Despite dropping $44 billion on Twitter just to nearly run it into the ground, Elon Musk is *still* craving the attention his father refused to give him, making it our problem by re-coding the entire platform to skyrocket his posts and replies to the very top of our feeds.
Over the weekend, Musk briefly left his post at the center of the grindset bro circle jerk to make his remaining employees’ lives a bit more miserable after realizing that President Joe Biden’s tweet cheering on the Philadelphia Eagles during Sunday night’s Super Bowl received nearly 20 million more impressions than a similar post he tweeted and later deleted, per Platformer.
NEW: Elon Musk directed Twitter engineers to design a secret system to boost his tweets over everyone else's after his post about the Super Bowl did poorly compared to President Biden's: https://t.co/HsJ0BZOSCI
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) February 15, 2023
Elon Musk ordered major changes to Twitter this weekend after ... President Biden's tweet about the Eagles got higher engagement than his did.
— Casey Newton (@CaseyNewton) February 15, 2023
Inside the secret system that's showing you all his tweets first, from @zoeschiffer and me. https://t.co/iaNaYxkR0Y pic.twitter.com/bYKjIjJe72
Allegedly irked that his post only generated 9.1 million impressions as compared to the President’s, which generated 29 million impressions, Musk did what any rational, level-headed leader would do in this situation — immediately flying to Twitter HQ for an in-person meeting in which he reportedly threatened to fire some of his engineers.
“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” Musk’s cousin, Twitter higher-up James Musk, wrote in a “high urgency” 2:36 a.m. Slack message, adding the “@here” tag to send a notification to every member of the channel. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem.” Per Platformer.
my entire for “for you” tab is elon musk tweets and replies. i guess this is the product of him threatening to fire engineers if they didn’t boost his tweet engagement. pic.twitter.com/8WvxRvRAxG
— Paris Marx (@parismarx) February 13, 2023
The following day, the approximately 80 engineers tapped for the high-pressure project emerged victorious.
“Twitter deployed code to automatically ‘greenlight’ all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his tweets will bypass Twitter’s filters designed to show people the best content possible,” wrote Platformer reporters Zoë Schiffer and Casey Newton, noting that this “artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000,” which probably isn’t only thing he needs artificially boosted by four-digit factors.
Though they may have kept their jobs — much unlike the engineer who dared to tell Musk that no, the Twitter algorithm is not sabotaging his engagement— they did so at a cost, forcing us to embrace Musk as he fills the typically-dreaded role of Twitter’s main character.
Shortly after these changes were implemented, Twitter users began to notice that their feeds now featured a whole lot of Elon, whether they wanted it to or not — the latter being the prevailing sentiment.
Why is my entire For You tab just Elon Musk replies and an ad lmao pic.twitter.com/X3QEoEctXp
— brASSica (@raylolpez) February 13, 2023
There's a bizarre bug where tweets from the @elonmusk account keep being shown at the top of the "for you" tab. That never happened until you fired that dude for pointing out that your flagging engagement was in fact real. Strange coincidence.
— Ian Hamilton (@ianhamilton_) February 13, 2023
As the backlash began rolling in, including the hashtag #BlockElon trending as people attempted to remove the entrepreneur from their feeds, Musk addressed the controversy the only way he seemingly knew how — shitposting.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023
“Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm,’” he wrote in a post that has garnered more than 55 million views.
Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… “algorithm”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023
We aren’t shocked to say it, but Elon owning Twitter has been even more epic than we could have hoped for.
8 Comments