Tesla chief unpopular? Elon Musk changes Twitter algorithm

Twitter has always been Elon Musk’s favorite mouthpiece. The tech billionaire not only used the short message service to make his sometimes questionable political views known. On top of that, he caused share prices to tumble or explode here with announcements of economic steps. But the irony of fate seems to have been throwing a spanner in the works of the head of successful companies like Tesla and SpaceX for some time now. Since Musk also became CEO of Twitter, his popularity on the social network has been in a noticeable decline. To change this, developers at Twitter are now to change the source code.

Elon Musk is everywhere

When Elon Musk moved into the chief executive offices of Twitter in October 2022, the outcry among regular users was great. These were not only snubbed by the partly contradictory tweets that the controversial entrepreneur let fly in the run-up to the Twitter purchase. On top of that, the South African-born entrepreneur caused various heads to roll in the company during his Twitter takeover. Not only was the entire executive floor replaced, but the ranks of developers were also thinned out. So it’s hardly surprising that Musk is anything but popular. This image, which the billionaire has rightly earned, is now to change. Musk is said to have instructed his developers to fine-tune Twitter’s algorithm.

You may have already noticed the changes. The tweets of the controversial tech entrepreneur now dominate the entire “For You Page”. Of course, that’s not supposed to be the point if you want to win sympathy points and not be annoying. Rather, the exaggerated number of Musk tweets is said to be a software error. When trying to adjust the algorithm, Elon Musk’s presence seems to have been a bit too large. The Twitter boss then immediately admitted to adjustments with the tweet “Stay tuned while we adjust the algorithm”. In reference to this, community ideas such as a separate column with tweets from Elon Musk came up.

Musk laid off employees due to declining popularity

In the past, Musk caused an increasingly negative stir with his behavior on Twitter. For example, he set off retweets to conspiracy ideological content of the QAnon movement. However, he himself apparently cannot imagine that it is his person and his tweets with which he has gambled away his popularity. At the very least, he let go of responsible software developers at Twitter because, in his view, they were to blame for the shrunken fanbase. How much the shrunken reach and popularity apparently snubs him is evident from a report by the Verge. According to this, Musk reportedly responded to the poor numbers at a company meeting by saying, “This is ridiculous. I have 100 million followers and I only ever get tens of thousands of interactions.”

That the view of the tech billionaire is almost schizophrenic, probably immediately wanted to prove him two employees. They started a Google search, which probably also proved the shrunken popularity of the Tesla boss. Musk was naturally anything but pleased about this. As a result, he fired the two developers from the Twitter team. The reaction to the problem, which was presumably not self-inflicted, followed immediately. Elon Musk had a new patch installed in the Twitter software over the weekend. Tweets from profiles with many followers are given preferential treatment. We are curious to see when the new algorithm will be adjusted in such a way that the current “predominance” of Elon Musk’s tweets on Twitter’s homepage will pay off again.