This story is based on interviews with people familiar with the events involved and supported by documents obtained from platformer.
At 2:36 a.m. Monday morning, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.
“We’re debugging an engagement issue across the platform,” Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, wrote, tagging @here in Slack to make sure everyone online would see it. “Anyone who can create dashboards and write software, please help solve this problem. This is of great urgency. If you are willing to help, please give this post a thumbs up.”
As weary-eyed engineers began logging on to their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s Super Bowl tweet drew less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.
Biden’s tweet saying he will support his wife to stand up for the Philadelphia Eagles, almost 29 million impressions generated. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated just over 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.
Following those losses — the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs and Musk to the President of the United States — Twitter’s CEO flew his private jet back to the Bay Area Sunday night to demand answers from his team.
Engineers have devised a system to ensure Elon Musk benefits from exclusive promotions for his tweets
Within a day, the aftermath of that meeting would resonate around the world as Twitter users opened up the app and found Musk’s posts overwhelming their rankings. It wasn’t a coincidence, as Platformer can attest: after Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system to ensure that Musk – and Musk alone – benefited from previously unprecedented promotion of his tweets to the entire user base benefits.
For the past few weeks, Musk has become obsessed with how much engagement his posts are getting. Last week, Platformer broke the news that he had fired one of the company’s two remaining chief engineers after the engineer told him that views on his tweets are declining in part because interest in Musk in general has waned.
His deputies told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that they would all lose their jobs unless the engagement issue was “solved.”
Musk personally addressed his team late Sunday evening. Around 80 employees were involved in the project, which quickly became the company’s number one priority. The staff worked through the night, examining various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought and testing possible solutions.
One possibility, engineers said, was that Musk’s range may have been reduced because he’s been blocked and muted by so many people over the past few months. Even before this weekend’s events, Musk’s long tenure as a mainstay of Twitter, both before and after his $44 billion acquisition of the company, had resulted in large numbers of people filtering him from their feeds.
But there were also legitimate technical reasons why the CEO’s tweets weren’t working. Twitter’s system has historically promoted tweets from users whose posts perform better with both followers and non-followers in the For You tab; Musk’s tweets should have matched this model, but they were only showing about half as few times as some engineers thought they should.
On Monday afternoon “the problem” was “fixed”. Twitter deployed code to automatically “greenlight” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts bypass Twitter’s filters, which are designed to show people the best possible content. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000 – a constant score that ensured his tweets ranked higher than everyone else in the feed.
Internally, this is referred to as the “power user multiplier,” though we’re told it only applies to Elon Musk. The code also allows Musk’s account to bypass Twitter heuristics that would otherwise prevent a single account from flooding the core-ranked feed now known as “For You.”
That explains why people who opened the app on Monday found Musk dominating the feed, with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to anyone who followed him and millions more who didn’t followed. According to an internal estimate, over 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets.
Musk confirmed his timeline bombardment Tuesday afternoon, releasing a version of the popular “forced to drink milk“Memes in which a woman labeled “Elon’s Tweets” force-feeds another woman labeled “Twitter” while pulling her hair back.
Some of his tweets were sent Monday while he was on the phone with Twitter engineers to test if the solutions they were designing were working as well as he thought they should.
“Please stay tuned in while we make adjustments to the er… ‘algorithm'”
After Musk’s timeline takeover caused an uproar on Monday, he appeared to indicate that the changes would be at least partially reverted. “Please stay tuned in while we make adjustments to the er…”algorithm.” he tweeted.
The artificial boosts applied to his account remain, although the factor is now below 1,000 as we were told. Musk’s handful of tweets on Tuesday reported around 43 million impressions, which is on the high end of his recent average.
As absurd as Musk’s antics are, they highlight a tension familiar to almost anyone who’s ever used a social network: Why are some posts more popular than others? Why am I seeing this thing and not that?
Engineers for services like TikTok and Instagram can provide some general answers to these questions. But ranking algorithms make predictions based on hundreds or thousands of signals and serve posts to millions of users, making it almost impossible to say with any degree of accuracy who is watching what.
For better or for worse, that answer wasn’t good enough for Musk. As Twitter’s most prominent user with nearly 129 million followers, his posts often get 10 million or more impressions, according to Twitter. (There are good reason to doubt the accuracy of these countsbut better data are not readily available.)
But Musk’s opinion numbers still fluctuate wildly. The bottle-feeding tweet received 118.4 million impressions; his next, a hoax observation previously posted on Reddit and satirically attributed to Abraham Lincoln, got 49.9 million. Some of his tweets from earlier this month had under 8 million.
The most obvious reason for this discrepancy is that people think some tweets are better than others. But it doesn’t have to work that way: you could also change the ranking algorithms to show your posts anyway.
Fearing losing their job, this is the system Twitter engineers are now building.
“He bought the company, made a point of showing what he felt had been broken and tampered with under the previous management, then turned around and tampered with the platform to compel all users to engage just to hear his voice ‘ said a current employee. “I think we’ve gotten past the point where we think he genuinely wants what’s best for everyone here.”