Musk ‘fires top Twitter engineer over his declining view count’

Chief executive of social networking platform set his account to private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience

Elon Musk axed thousands of positions at Twitter soon after his $44 billion acquisition last year. Reuters

Twitter chief executive Elon Musk has fired a top engineer at the company for giving an explanation for his declining reach on the social networking platform.

A report on the website Platformer said Mr Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisers into a room at Twitter’s headquarters on Tuesday seeking answers to his falling engagement numbers.

“This is ridiculous,” Mr Musk reportedly told the employees.

“I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Mr Musk’s declining reach and showed him internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google trends chart.

Last April, Mr Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine, the engineer said.

Musk did not take the news well.

“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Mr Musk told the engineer, according to the report. The website, however, did not disclose the name of the engineer in light of the harassment Mr Musk has directed at former Twitter employees.

Last week, the Twitter chief executive set his Twitter account to private for a day to test whether that might boost the size of his audience.

Mr Musk also axed thousands of positions at the social media platform soon after his $44 billion acquisition last year.

His team ordered nearly two dozen employees who spoke out publicly and privately against him to be fired, The New York Times reported in November.

They were told that their contracts had been terminated for “violating company policy”, the Times said.

He also sacked Parag Agrawal, former chief executive of Twitter along with other top executives as soon as he took control of the social networking platform in October.