Recently, Musk appeared to be really concerned about the level of engagement his posts have been receiving. This month, Platformer reported that he terminated one of the company’s two surviving principal engineers after the engineer cautioned him that views on his tweets were declining due to a reduction in overall interest in Musk. Over the weekend, his deputies informed the technical staff that they would lose their jobs if the engagement issue was not resolved.
Late on Sunday night, Musk spoke to approximately 80 employees in person and made the project a top priority. They worked all night, testing different ideas to understand why Musk’s tweets were not reaching as many people as he anticipated and implementing potential solutions. Some engineers believed that Musk’s reach had been reduced because he had been blocked and muted by numerous users in recent months.
Before this weekend’s events, Musk’s extended tenure as Twitter’s leading figure, both before and after his $44 billion acquisition of the business, had prompted many users to block him from their feeds. Twitter has now implemented code to “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, allowing them to bypass filters designed to display the best possible content. This “power user multiplier” only applies to Musk and enables his tweets to be prioritized over everyone else’s in the feed. Furthermore, Musk’s account is exempt from Twitter rules that would typically limit a single account from dominating the primary ranking feed, now known as “For You.”
As a result, when users opened the app on Monday, they saw Musk’s tweets dominating the feed, with a dozen or more visible to his followers and millions of others who did not follow him. According to an internal estimate, over 90% of Musk’s followers now receive his tweets.
