Months after Elon Musk bought the social media company X, then known as Twitter, he allegedly fired an employee for telling him that people were losing interest in his posts.
The 2023 incident came soon after the tech multibillionaire’s $44 billion purchase of the platform, and is just one story that illustrates the chaotic aftermath of Musk’s takeover, detailed in a new book.
Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley by Jacob Silverman examines Twitter’s sale and the rapid changes to the organization in which around half the workforce was fired, previously banned accounts were reinstated, content moderation crashed, and how Musk allegedly curated the “for you” feed into a mirror of his own interests.
The book sheds new light on how the power Musk accessed through the purchase of the news-cycle-driving platform rapidly reshaped his approach to politics and fed his desire and expectation to be able to mould public debate.
Key to this was apparently Musk’s desperate need to be regarded as popular, the book claims.
Perplexed as to why his posts were seeing declining levels of engagement despite his high follower count, Silverman recounts a report first published by online news outlet Platformer.
At the time, Platformer’s report said Musk held a meeting with senior Twitter staff.
“This is ridiculous,” Musk reportedly said. “I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions.”
Engineers worked to understand Musk’s waning influence on his own platform, investigating whether his reach had somehow been “artificially restricted”. Nonetheless they found no evidence that the algorithm was biased against him.
Upon being told this by one of the company’s two remaining principle engineers, Musk reportedly did not respond well.
“You’re fired, you’re fired,” he told the engineer.
The story, which was reported by Platformer in 2023, was published just three days before another incident showcasing Musk’s overriding concern about how Twitter was working to amplify his reach.
Silverman recounts how, during the 2023 Super Bowl, Musk tweeted his support for the Philadelphia Eagles. Then-president Joe Biden also fired off a tweet announcing his support for the Philadelphia Eagles too.
“Biden’s tweet generated about three times the number of views as Musk’s,” Silverman writes, according to an extract published in Newsweek.
“That apparently was unacceptable to Musk, who deleted his tweet and flew to California after the game to demand changes to Twitter’s algorithm,” he added.
Alongside these behind-the-scenes tantrums, Musk was also behaving increasingly erratically on Twitter, the book suggests.
“In full public view, it seemed as though Musk was being radicalized by the paranoid online right, being baptized into their ranks,” Silverman writes.
As users left the platform in large numbers, with the site taking a dive in advertising revenue, Musk memorably said in November 2023 that companies critical of his posts can “go f*** yourselves”.
This culminated in the departure in April 2024 of Edward Perez, X’s director for civic integrity.
“Musk is a poster child for divisive racist, sexist, and plutocratic tendencies that undermine democracy’s commitment to equality for all,” wrote Perez at the time.
Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley is published by Bloomsbury Continuum on 7 October in the U.S. and 9 October in the U.K.
