The Morning After: Elon Musk reportedly had his own tweets boosted out of jealousy

If you've been using Twitter's For You feed this week, you might’ve noticed the algorithmic feed showed a lot of Elon Musk's tweets and replies. According to Platformer, which interviewed Twitter employees, engineers tweaked the social network to benefit their CEO. Elon's cousin and Twitter employee James Musk sent an urgent message on the company's Slack on Monday morning. He called the situation "high urgency" and asked everyone who can write code to help.

What had happened? President Biden's Super Bowl tweet about rooting for the Philadelphia Eagles got more engagement than Musk's. Apparently, the president's tweet generated almost 29 million impressions, whereas Musk's generated only 9.1 million before he deleted it.

The fix they came up with, Platformer says, was code that artificially boosted Musk's tweets by a factor of 1,000. Musk acknowledged the change in his own way, by posting the "forced to drink milk" meme. He also asked people to stay tuned while Twitter adjusted the "algorithm." According to the report, Musk's tweets are still artificially boosted, it seems, just not quite as much.

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.

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Mat Smith

– Mat Smith

The Morning After isn’t just a newsletter – it’s also a daily podcast. Get our daily audio briefings, Monday through Friday, by subscribing right here.