Posted by One guaranteed way to grow your Twitter engagement: Buy Twitter and demand its engineers boost your posts. That’s what CEO Elon Musk did this Monday, after his tweet about the Super Bowl was less popular than President Biden’s.
Here’s how it went down, according to Platformer:
- James Musk—Twitter employee and Elon’s nepo-cousin—sent the equivalent of a “u up?” message on the company Slack at 2:36am, asking for help with the “high urgency” problem.
- By Monday afternoon, 80 employees had tweaked Twitter’s algorithm to boost Musk’s tweets by 1,000x—bottle-feeding them to users.
Elon’s Twitter tantrum may have been partially justified: The social media company’s engineers estimated his tweets were showing up in feeds less often than they should have. But 1,000x was an overcorrection. After users complained that Musk’s memes outranked their baby announcements, Twitter scaled back the artificial boost.
Zoom out: Investors in Musk’s other T company, Tesla, want the multi-CEO to stop focusing on Twitter and turn his attention back to EVs. But even with Musk taking on too much work (by his own admission), Tesla stock has popped 70% this year, pushing him closer to reclaiming the title of world’s richest person. Yesterday, Musk said that he plans to find a new CEO to take his place at Twitter toward the end of this year.
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