Elon Musk demonstrates ignorance of how Twitter works by firing an engineer for his own low engagement

Reasons why someone might be fired from their job could include illegal activity, or a breach of contract. Or, in the case of very recent events, being affected by the company’s “cost-cutting measures” during a recession. But what if you lost your job because of your boss’ personal social media account? That’s what happened recently at Twitter, where one of the site’s engineers was fired due to Elon Musk‘s account having low engagement.

In an interview with Platformer, an anonymous engineer maintains that Musk fired him because he told his boss the truth about why his personal Twitter account receives relatively few likes, comments, or retweets. According to the former Twitter employee, Musk was wondering why his tweets should perform so poorly when he has millions of followers. The engineer examined the algorithm to determine whether Musk was restricted in any way whatsoever, but found no evidence of that being the case. When he explained this to his boss, Musk immediately fired him. Notably, a tweet highlighting the Platformer interview racked up huge engagement almost immediately, dwarfing Musk’s.

It’s one thing to fire the company’s social media manager because their work isn’t driving results back to the company. But this is Musk’s personal account. Unless he has someone running it for him (it seems likely he doesn’t), it doesn’t make sense to fire an engineer just because Musk doesn’t know how the engagement works.

As of this writing, Musk’s newest posts received between 1-33 million views during the last 24 hours. The most-engaged was his recent announcement that the Turkish government will reenable access to the website after it was blocked. That tweet received over 34 million views, but has only 24.6k retweets and 290k likes.

So it seems like Musk’s Twitter is still capturing the eyes of users. He just wants more people to engage with his posts.

It’s funny that Musk is complaining about impressions and engagement, considering that users have reported that he can no longer be blocked since he became CEO, and that he locked his account to test if it would increase user engagement. While he did warn everyone early in his reign that “Twitter will do a lot of dumb things” in the coming months, “firing your employees because you’re slowly becoming irrelevant” has to be added to that list.