It's been months since Elon Musk took over Twitter, but the difficulties that come with a shift in management have not died down. Employees still work in fear as they might be fired on a whim, and one has for giving an answer that he didn't want to hear.
Employee Getting the Boot
It seems like it was only possible in movies for a boss to fire an employee outright for petty reasons, but that's not the case for Musk. For context, the Twitter CEO made the change in Twitter a while ago where the view counts can now be seen alongside the tweet.
Musk took his Twitter account private to test if his followers see his private tweets more than his public ones, and he didn't like the outcome. He consulted a group of engineers and advisors and asked why his engagements were not what he expected.
After all, he had over 100 million followers, as he said, so it didn't make sense that he was only getting tens of thousands of impressions, and called the situation "ridiculous," as mentioned in The Verge. Of course, one of his employees had to come up with an answer.
One of his principal engineers showed him Twitter's internal data which held the engagements on his account, as well as a Google Trends chart. It showed that Musk was at peak popularity with a score of 100, but that day he was just at a nine.
The engineers even looked into it to find possible explanations for the sudden drop in popularity, but they found no evidence of the algorithm affecting the CEO's engagements. For someone who tweets a lot, that kind of news is not something they'd want to hear.
"You're fired, you're fired," was what Musk responded. Musk did not accept the explanation and instructed employees to track the behavior regarding his tweets like how many times they were recommended. If anything, this stunt just made his employees' fears grow even more.
Is Twitter Rotting from the Inside Out?
There was an incident in the platform where users were told that they have exceeded their daily limit for tweeting. One employee accidentally deleted the data for the service that sets the limits for Twitter, and the employees that worked on that certain service had already been fired.
Reports say that employees did not have much time for making Twitter better, as they were busy correcting things caused by the mass layoffs, trying to achieve impossible tasks that were required of them, and working on "efficiency" even if there was no goal set.
An employee said that Musk would sometimes be awake late at night and say things that don't make sense. Employment has been so unpredictable that casual greetings turned to questions about other job offers.
Twitter employees are already familiar with the fact that a wrong statement can cost them their jobs, so they tread carefully when answering questions asked by the CEO. This kind of workplace might also be the reason why Twitter has not been meeting user standards.
According to a forecast by Insider Intelligence, Twitter's user base will drop by 3.9% going from 368.4 million users to 353.9 million users this 2023. Even more so for 2024, where they anticipate another drop of 5.1%, resulting in a loss of 32.7 million users in two years.
