Elon Musk reportedly fired a Twitter engineer because of his own ego

Reports suggest Elon Musk’s almost tyrannical takeover of Twitter shows no sign of calming down as it’s claimed the billionaire fired an engineer for a majorly petty reason.

According to a report by Platformer, a tech industry site, the CEO questioned an engineer as to why engagement on his own tweets was lower than he deemed it should be.

Musk has over 128 million followers and was allegedly concerned that views on his tweets appear to have decreased since he took over the company.

One new feature implemented by Musk was to add a public view count to every tweet and it is this number that seems to have angered the billionaire CEO.

“This is ridiculous,” Platformer claim Musk said in a meeting which resulted in him firing one of the remaining two principal engineers. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”

Sign up to our new free Indy100 weekly newsletter

It’s believed employees found that there was no evidence to suggest any bias in the algorithm against Musk, leading them to believe it must be a natural decline in interest in him.

These facts were presented to Musk in the meeting and even included a Google trends chart that demonstrated how interest in him has decreased dramatically, going from Google’s “interest” rating of 100 in April 2022 to his current rating of nine.

Musk took the news as well as you may expect, and allegedly told the engineer who delivered the news, “You’re fired, You’re fired” on the spot.

His actions appear to follow a trend as Musk fired half of Twitter’s workforce when he first took over and has since been accused of firing employees who disagree or criticise him.

Have your say in our news democracy. Click the upvote icon at the top of the page to help raise this article through the indy100 rankings.