‘HIGH URGENCY’

Elon Did Actually Mess With Twitter Algorithm to Juice His Own Numbers: Report

The billionaire was reportedly peeved when his Super Bowl tweet performed worse than the president’s.

Remember that guy who everyone thought was going to colonize Mars? Well, now he’s the guy who deliberately flooded everyone else’s Twitter feeds with his own tweets, according to Platformer. The tech blog reported Tuesday that Elon Musk had Twitter’s engineers cobble together code allowing him to receive “previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base,” with the new algorithm artificially boosting the billionaire’s tweets over—quite literally—everyone else’s. The inciting incident to this megalomaniacal episode was, according to Platformer, Sunday’s Super Bowl. Specifically, he appeared peeved when his tweet about the game performed worse than one fired off by the President of the United States (earning 9.1 million and nearly 29 million impressions, respectively). At 2:36 a.m. the next morning, Musk’s cousin alerted Twitter’s team to this “high urgency” issue, which had been “fixed” by that afternoon. A current employee told Platformer that Musk was manipulating Twitter “to force engagement on all users to hear only his voice,” adding, “I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here.”