After watching the Super Bowl in the company of Emperor Palpatine’s human form, Rupert Murdoch, Elon Musk was upset people weren’t paying attention to him. More specifically, he was upset that more people were paying attention to Joe Biden. And even more specifically, Musk was pissed that the President’s Super Bowl tweet rooting for his hometown Philadelphia Eagles got more than three times more impressions than Musk’s shout-out to the Iggles.
As Platformer News reports, there was no downtime for Twitter’s engineers. After his return from the game in Arizona, Musk assembled 80 remaining Twitter employees for an in-person meeting Sunday night to demand they change the algorithm that selects tweets to put into people’s feeds to cram Musk’s tweets over anyone else’s–even stifling the reach of the President of the United States to feed his ego. On Monday morning, when about 1 in 6 workers suffered from Big Game hangovers, engineers found the company’s Slack channel contained a demand from the CEO, issued through his cousin (who apparently works for the company) making an “all hands on deck” call to fix the “problem” which wasn’t a problem for anything but Musk’s ego.
After Musk fired engineers who told him he simply wasn’t as popular as he thought he was, a brave employee told Musk his impressions were down because the algorithm noted many users had blocked or muted his account, likely because they became tired of his rants and extremist views. Biden’s 29 million views for his Super Bowl tweet, versus Musk’s lowly 9 million, came because people haven’t muted the President’s account. So to fix the problem, engineers removed all barriers to Musk’s tweets, adding them to nearly everyone’s “For You” tab and increasing his impressions by around 1,000 percent, which is apparently what $44 billion buys you.