After throwing a hissy fit last week because his tweets weren’t getting enough views, Twitter CEO Elon Musk seems to have finally gotten what he wanted: Musk-filled feeds.
On Monday, I noticed that my ‘For You’ feed on Twitter had surprisingly more Musk tweets than usual. I didn’t make much of the occurrence at first and reasoned Musk was probably tweeting up a storm while pretending to work again, until I saw that other users were getting Musk-bombed, too. Given that the billionaire fired an engineer who told him people didn’t seem to be interested in him anymore, a lightbulb went off in my head: Ah, this was on purpose.
Shortly after midnight on Tuesday, Musk himself seemed to chime in to confirm my theory, tweeting out a meme of a girl forcing another to drink milk. He labelled the girl holding the milk bottle “Elon’s tweets” and the girl being forced to drink the milk “Twitter.”
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 14, 2023
Although he didn’t acknowledge the Musk-filled feeds, the billionaire tweeted at 3 a.m. ET that his company was tinkering with the algorithm.
“Please stay tuned while we make adjustments to the uh .… ‘algorithm,’” he said.
The changes to Twitter’s feed and Musk’s comments are the latest developments in Musk’s obsession over the number of views he gets on his social network. The saga began on Feb. 1, when the CEO decided to make his account private to see whether that affected his views. The following week, he called a meeting of Twitter’s advisors and engineers to ask why his account, which has nearly 130 million followers, was getting so little views.
“This is ridiculous,” Musk said, as reported by the Platformer newsletter. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
Over the weekend, Musk dramatically announced that two significant Twitter problems had been solved, which were mainly related to him. He explained that the company’s engineers had fixed issues that resulted in 95% of his tweets “not getting delivered at all.”
How exactly that helps anyone else on Twitter besides Musk and the right-wrong accounts complaining about their lack of views is unclear, but one thing’s certain: It’s highly unlikely that Musk is going to throw a tantrum over his tweets suddenly flooding everyone’s feeds.