Musk sacks staffer over popularity

One of Twitter’s two ­remaining principal engineers reportedly told the billionaire his antics might be the reason for his declining engagement numbers.

Elon Musk has sacked more than half of Twitter’s staff since taking charge. Picture: Bloomberg

Elon Musk sacked a senior Twitter engineer on the spot in a row about his declining popularity on the platform, it has been claimed.

The billionaire called a meeting of advisers and engineers last Tuesday at the company’s headquarters in San Francisco to discuss why his engagement numbers were declining, the Platformer newsletter reported.

“This is ridiculous. I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions,” Mr Musk is said to have complained.

When one of Twitter’s two ­remaining principal engineers said the explanation could be a ­declining interest in the Twitter chief’s antics, Mr Musk told him: “You’re fired, you’re fired.”

Mr Musk’s engagement on the platform has dropped from its peak score of 100 last April to nine, according to internal data shown to him at the meeting.

He recently introduced a feature that displays how many times a tweet has been viewed. Designed to improve the experience, it also shows how little some followers engage with accounts.

Concerns were raised last week about the platform’s stability after one of the biggest technical glitches since Mr Musk’s takeover in October.

Tens of thousands of users were unable to tweet after being told they had reached their tweet limit. An employee had inadvertently deleted the rate limits, but the team in charge of that service had left Twitter last year.

Mr Musk has sacked more than half of Twitter’s staff, some of them by tweet after they publicly criticised him.

Among the teams laid off were those in the Brussels ­office, which appears to have affected regulatory work demanded by the European Commission.

Twitter was accused by senior European officials last week of not being serious about tackling disinformation.

The company submitted a below-par report compared with TikTok, Meta, Google and Microsoft, they said.

Mr Musk has also said he will shut down a free feed of Twitter’s data, its API, which is used by ­researchers.

Conservative British politician Lord Bethell said the “dramatic ­restriction, made with only a week’s warning, will disrupt critical research … (UK communications regulator) Ofcom, government and NGOs would be starved of vital insights on emerging harms and deep dives into complex harms, such as the convergence and hybridisation of conspiracist movements”.

Mr Musk then seemed to change his stand, tweeting: “Twitter will enable a light, write-only API for bots providing good content that is free.”

The Times