This story is based on interviews with people familiar with the events involved and supported by documents obtained by platforms.
At 2:36 a.m. Monday, James Musk sent an urgent message to Twitter engineers.
“We are debugging an issue with platform-wide engagement,” Musk, a cousin of the Twitter CEO, wrote as he tagged “@here” in Slack to make sure anyone online sees it. “Anyone who can create dashboards and write software can help solve this problem. This is highly urgent. If you’re willing to help, please like this post.”
As teary-eyed engineers began logging into their laptops, the nature of the emergency became clear: Elon Musk’s tweet about the Super Bowl garnered less engagement than President Joe Biden’s.
Biden’s tweet, in which he said he would support his wife in supporting the Philadelphia Eagles, generated almost 29 million impressions. Musk, who also tweeted his support for the Eagles, generated just over 9.1 million impressions before deleting the tweet in apparent frustration.
In the wake of those losses (the Eagles to the Kansas City Chiefs and Musk to the President of the United States), the Twitter CEO flew his private plane back to the Bay Area Sunday night to demand answers from his team.
The engineers built a system designed to ensure that Elon Musk benefits from the exclusive promotion of his tweets.
Within a day, the fallout from that meeting would reverberate around the world, as Twitter users opened the app to find that Musk’s posts overwhelmed their classified timeline. This was not an accident platforms can confirm: After Musk threatened to fire his remaining engineers, they built a system designed to ensure that Musk, and only Musk, benefits from never-before-seen promotion of his tweets to the entire user base.
In recent weeks, Musk has been obsessed with how much engagement his posts are getting. Last week, platforms broke the news that fired one of the two remaining senior engineers at the company after being told by the engineer that views on his tweets are declining in part because interest in Musk has declined overall.
His aides told the rest of the engineering team this weekend that if the compromise problem wasn’t “fixed,” they would all lose their jobs, too.
On Sunday night, Musk addressed his team in person. Approximately 80 people were drawn to work on the project, which quickly became the company’s number one priority. Employees worked through the night investigating various hypotheses about why Musk’s tweets weren’t reaching as many people as he thought they should and testing possible solutions.
One possibility, the engineers said, was that Musk’s range might have been reduced because many people had blocked and muted him in recent months. Even before the events of this weekend, Musk’s long stint as Twitter’s main character, both before and after his $44 billion acquisition of the company, had led large numbers of people to leak it from their feeds.
But there were also legitimate technical reasons why the CEO’s tweets weren’t working. Historically, Twitter’s system has promoted tweets from users whose posts work best for both followers and non-followers in the For You tab; Musk’s tweets should have fit that model, but they appeared fewer only about half the time some engineers thought they should.
By Monday afternoon, “the problem” had been “fixed.” Twitter implemented code to automatically “green light” all of Musk’s tweets, meaning his posts will bypass Twitter filters designed to show people the best possible content. The algorithm now artificially boosted Musk’s tweets by a factor of 1,000, a consistent score that ensured his tweets ranked higher than anyone else’s in the feed.
Internally, this is called the “power user multiplier”, although it only applies to Elon Musk, we’re told. The code also allows Musk’s account to bypass Twitter heuristics that would otherwise prevent a single account from flooding the main classified feed, now known as “For You.”
That explains why people who opened the app on Monday found that Musk dominated the feed, with a dozen or more Musk tweets and replies visible to anyone who followed him and millions more who didn’t. More than 90 percent of Musk’s followers now see his tweets, according to an internal estimate.
Musk acknowledged his timeline bombardment Tuesday afternoon, posting a version of the popular “forced to drink milkmeme in which a woman labeled “Elon’s Tweets” force-feeds a bottle to another woman labeled “Twitter” while pulling her hair back.
Some of his tweets on Monday were sent while he was on calls with Twitter engineers, to test whether the solutions they had designed worked as well as he thought they should.
“Stay tuned as we make adjustments to the uh… ‘algorithm'”
After Musk’s timeline takeover caused quite a stir on Monday, he seemed to suggest that the changes would be reversed, at least in part. “Please stay tuned as we make adjustments to the er… “algorithm,” tweeted.
The artificial boosts applied to your account are still in effect, although the factor is now less than 1,000, we’re told. Musk’s handful of tweets on Tuesday reported around 43 million impressions, which is at the higher end of his recent average.
As absurd as Musk’s antics are, they highlight a tension familiar to almost anyone who has ever used a social network: Why are some posts more popular than others? Why do I see this thing and not that?
Service engineers like TikTok and Instagram can offer high-level partial answers to these questions. But ranking algorithms make predictions based on hundreds or thousands of signals and deliver posts to millions of users, making it nearly impossible for anyone to say with any degree of accuracy who sees what.
For better or worse, that response hasn’t been good enough for Musk. As Twitter’s most prominent user, with nearly 129 million followers, his posts typically get 10 million or more impressions, according to Twitter’s tally. (There is good reason to doubt the accuracy of these countsbut better data are not readily available).
But Musk’s view counts still fluctuate widely. The bottle-feeding tweet got 118.4 million impressions; his next, a joking remark previously posted on reddit and satirically attributed to Abraham Lincoln, got 49.9 million. Some of his tweets from earlier this month had fewer than 8 million.
The most obvious reason for this discrepancy is that people think that some tweets are better than others. but not have To make it work like this: You can also change the ranking algorithms to show your posts no matter what.
Terrified of losing their jobs, this is the system Twitter engineers are now building.
“He bought out the company, made sure to show what he thought was broken and rigged by the previous management, then turns around and rigs the platform to force all users to hear only his voice,” said one current employee. “I think we’re past the point of believing that he truly wants the best for everyone here.”
