[ExI] Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley

[John Clark]

 I haven't yet read the book "*Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon
Valley*" by Jacob Silverman but after reading the following brief book
review by Brian Harrod I intend to:
===
*He** raged after his tweets flopped... "I have 100 million followers, and
only getting thousands of impressions", **ElonMusk axed an X engineer after
they delivered the harsh truth about why his posts were flopping, a new
book claims. **Journalist Jacob Silverman revealed in his book Gilded Rage:
Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley that Musk became fixated
on how people interacted with his posts following his $44 billion
acquisition of Twitter.*

*“Firing more than half of Twitter employees, Musk transformed how the
platform operated,” Silverman writes in an excerpt obtained by Newsweek
about the mass layoffs that occurred after the tech billionaire’s 2022
Twitter takeover. Silverman then details a 2023 firing reported at the time
by the tech news site Platformer.“He fired a company engineer who told him
that engagement on his tweets was down because people weren’t as interested
in him,” Silverman writes. The original report described how Musk gathered
engineers and advisers at Twitter’s headquarters in 2023, where multiple
sources recalled him saying: “This is ridiculous... 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,” Platformer reported, withholding
the engineer’s name due to the harassment Musk directed at former
employees. According to the publication, employees presented Musk with
internal data and a Google Trends chart showing his popularity had fallen
from a peak score of 100 to just nine. Musk then reportedly told the
engineer, “You’re fired, you’re fired.”*

*In his new book, Silverman cites an example—also reported at the time by
Platformer—recounting the 2023 Super Bowl, when both then-President Joe
Biden and Musk tweeted their support for the Philadelphia Eagles, with
Biden’s post generating nearly 20 million more impressions. “That
apparently was unacceptable to Musk, who deleted his tweet and flew to
California after the game to demand changes to Twitter’s algorithm,”
Silverman writes. Silverman then quotes an alleged 2:36 a.m. Slack message
from Musk’s cousin James Musk after the Super Bowl fiasco, which read: “We
are debugging an issue with engagement across the platform. Any people who
can make dashboards and write software please can you help solve this
problem. This is high urgency. If you are willing to help out please thumbs
up this post.”*

*“Thanks to the middle-of-the-night participation of 80 company engineers,
the ‘high urgency’ issue was quickly solved,” Silverman writes, detailing
the changes made that ensured “Twitter’s systems to privilege Musk’s posts
above all others. The For You feed became a mirror of Musk’s interests,
containing the right-wing accounts he followed,” . The author of the
original Platformer article, which detailed the operation to change the X
(formerly Twitter) algorithm, had been called out by Musk on X following
its publication*


*Musk Axed X Engineer After Truth About His Poor-Performing Posts
<https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/technology/musk-axed-x-engineer-after-truth-about-his-poor-performing-posts/ar-AA1NGYTM?fbclid=IwY2xjawNm51JleHRuA2FlbQIxMABicmlkETFEOWpTZjNCdGZRTEhlbGg1AR7MYpNZYw5piv12WII0cPxesbGFEPfueOc1oLdM7n6XLWwUiPy7D6EqnA8cAw_aem_93brsZA72K44W-N7Lq-wng>*

*John K Clark*

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