Elon Musk forced Twitter engineers to promote his unpopular, uncool tweets

On Monday, the chances are the first tweet at the very top of your Twitter timeline was from Elon Musk. That was not a bug or some malfunction from an increasingly glitchy social media platform. That was what Elon Musk wanted, and what he made Twitter engineers do all night and all morning after the Super Bowl. As it turns out, Musk got his diaper-baby feelings hurt when Joe Biden’s Super Bowl tweet did bigger numbers than Musk’s Super Bowl tweet. So Musk called an emergency at Twitter HQ and had them alter the algorithm. Because Elon Musk spent $44 billion to *force* people to see his dumb f–king tweets.

At 2:36 on Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.

“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform,” wrote Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, tagging “@here” in Slack to ensure that anyone online would see it. “Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”

When bleary-eyed engineers began to log on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl got less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.

Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would be supporting his wife in rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles, generated nearly 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated a little more than 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.

In the wake of those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs, and Musk to the president of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area on Sunday night to demand answers from his team.

Within a day, the consequences of that meeting would reverberate around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their ranked timeline. This was no accident, Platformer can confirm: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk — and Musk alone — benefits from previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.

[From Platformer]

That Platformer article has even more pathetic detail about Musk’s obsession with his tweets’ low-engagement numbers as Twitter users have, en masse, been ignoring him and muting him for months. Musk threatened to fire anyone who told him that he is simply unpopular and uncool, and he seriously tasked over 80 Twitter engineers with solely promoting his tweets on everyone’s timeline. The new algorithm “artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets rank higher than anyone else’s in the feed.” A more pathetic, juvenile dumbass would be hard to find.

Of course Biden’s tweet got more engagement! He’s the president! And it’s cute!

But as Jill Biden’s husband, fly Eagles, fly. https://t.co/YtgaEC83Qj

— President Biden (@POTUS) February 13, 2023

Photos courtesy of Cover Images.

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