Banks Loaned Elon Musk $13 Billion So He Could Boost His Twitter Engagement
Other people's money is awesome.
Last night’s livestream was quite good. You can watch the rewind here or listen to the podcast version here.
1. Twitter
Casey Newton broke an amazing story yesterday:
On Tuesday, Musk gathered a group of engineers and advisors into a room at Twitter’s headquarters looking for answers. Why are his engagement numbers tanking?
“This is ridiculous,” he said, according to multiple sources with direct knowledge of the meeting. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
One of the company’s two remaining principal engineers offered a possible explanation for Musk’s declining reach: just under a year after the Tesla CEO made his surprise offer to buy Twitter for $44 billion, public interest in his antics is waning.
Employees showed Musk internal data regarding engagement with his account, along with a Google Trends chart. Last April, they told him, Musk was at “peak” popularity in search rankings, indicated by a score of “100.” Today, he’s at a score of nine. Engineers had previously investigated whether Musk’s reach had somehow been artificially restricted, but found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Musk did not take the news well.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” Musk told the engineer.
Read the whole thing and subscribe to Newton’s newsletter.
All I could think about was reading this was the moment in Triangle of Sadness when a wealthy woman asks the captain of a luxury yacht to have the ship’s sails cleaned. He tries valiantly to explain that it is a motorized ship and has no sails. She is unconvinced.
Oh, and the Twitter view counts? They might not be—strictly speaking—super . . . scientific? I’m Ron Burgundy?
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