Joe Biden‘s tweet this past weekend about the Super Bowl was WAAAAAAAAY more popular than a similar one from Elon Musk, and the tech bro won’t let it go!
According to a new report, the Twitter founder has been fuming all week long after the President’s tweet tossing support behind the Philadelphia Eagles outpaced Musk’s own since-deleted message.
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So, this all started back on Sunday afternoon, hours before the NFL‘s much-anticipated big game.
Biden’s wife, Dr. Jill Biden, has roots in Philly. She has been very loudly cheering on the Eagles leading up to the football affair. And so Joe tweeted about his wife’s support for the squad, too! The Prez jokingly noted how he wouldn’t be “picking favorites” between the Eagles and Kansas City Chiefs, being a national politician and all. But!! He nevertheless wanted to back his wife and show her love, too:
As your president, I’m not picking favorites.
But as Jill Biden’s husband, fly Eagles, fly. https://t.co/YtgaEC83Qj
— President Biden (@POTUS) February 13, 2023
LOLz!
That’s a good line. Sadly, Jill’s Eagles lost, tho. Chiefs Kingdom reigned!
Anyways, based on the metrics Twitter shows on tweets, that post has picked up more than 29 million impressions (!) as of Wednesday morning. Musk — who was at the game in Arizona on Sunday night and sat alongside Fox News head honcho Rupert Murdoch — tweeted his own support of the Eagles, too. However, in a report published on Tuesday by Platformer, the “Chief Twit” only received a bit more than 9 million impressions on his own Philly tweet. And he deleted it out of apparent frustration at being blasted by Biden’s popularity! Yes, Elon apparently really is THAT thin-skinned!
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And it gets even worse!!! That same outlet reports Elon moved to immediately improve (?!) Twitter impression stats on the site for… his own tweets and only his own tweets. At 2:36 a.m. on Monday morning, Elon’s cousin James Musk took to the company Slack channel and wrote this frantic message to its engineers:
“We are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform. Any people who can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs up this post.”
Per the report, the “high urgency” issue at hand was that Elon’s Super Bowl tweet got far less engagement than Biden’s post. That was the whole f**king emergency. Seriously?!
Less than 24 hours after James allegedly pinged Twitter’s engineering team to “fix” Elon’s engagement numbers, the Tesla exec’s posts started showing up ALL over the social media site. The news org notes engineers made changes so that Musk “and Musk alone” was the beneficiary of “previously unheard-of promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.”
The report claims Musk has been “obsessed” in recent weeks with his engagement levels. Just last week, as has been previously reported across media outlets, Elon fired one of the last two principal engineers at the company after that person allegedly told the tech lead that views on his tweets are declining because people are losing interest in Elon’s storyline.
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By late Sunday night, Platformer claims, Elon addressed Twitter’s entire engineering team over the engagement issue. The site estimates 80 people were ordered to work on Elon’s vanity project. In fact, it “quickly become priority number one at the company.” The engineers were forced to work through the night and into the next morning “investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should.”
Bruh…
By Monday afternoon, the “problem” had been “fixed,” per the news org. Twitter engineers built out code to “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets all across the platform. Suddenly, he was everywhere. Some estimates claimed his tweets were boosted “by a factor of one thousand,” thereby ensuring his content was seen by virtually every Twitter user as they logged in.
Late on Monday night, even Musk himself was game to make fun of the new algorithm. In a referential tweet, Musk cited the popular “forced to drink milk” meme with his own captions about pushing his tweets out into the world:
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023
Then, just a few hours later on Tuesday morning, Musk joked that his engineers were continuing to adjust the “algorithm” for the site’s millions of end users:
Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… “algorithm”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023
At least he can laugh at himself a little bit with the milk meme and all? But, like, damn. Log off, dude! Touch grass, as the kids say. LOLz!
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Whatever is going on with the algorithm, Twitter engineers are frantically focused on trying to keep Elon happy. One unnamed “current employee” spoke to Platformer about the present-day vibe working at the tech firm:
“He bought the company, made a point of showcasing what he believed was broken and manipulated under previous management, then turns around and manipulates the platform to force engagement on all users to hear only his voice. I think we’re past the point of believing that he actually wants what’s best for everyone here.”
No kidding!!
By the way, you can read Platformer‘s full report on Elon’s apparent post-Super Bowl popularity push HERE.
Reactions, Perezcious readers??
[Image via MEGA/WENN]