Elon Musk fired an X engineer for telling him social media users weren’t engaging with his tweets simply because he wasn’t popular, a new book has claimed. 

Journalist Jacob Silverman revealed the X owner became obsessed with the number of social media users interacting with his account shortly after his $44billion takeover of Twitter. 

In his new book, Gilded Rage: Elon Musk and the Radicalization of Silicon Valley, Silverman revealed that the Twitter engineer was sacked at a mass meeting of staff. 

Having gathered engineers and advisers at the company’s headquarters, Musk told them: ‘This is ridiculous… I have more than 100 million followers, and I’m only getting tens of thousands of impressions’.

It was reported that a principal engineer presented Musk with internal data, along with a Google Trends chart that purportedly showed his popularity had fallen dramatically across the internet. 

An enraged Musk reportedly said in response: ‘You’re fired, you’re fired’.

Musk, who is now halfway to becoming the planet’s first trillionaire after his net value briefly soared to more than $500bn (£370.9bn), took over Twitter in October 2022. 

After buying around 9% of Twitter’s shares, he then made an offer to buy the then-publicly listed company for $44billion. 

Though he initially backtracked on this offer, he later followed through following a lawsuit, taking into his control and turning the company into a private firm with no shares on any stock markets.

He said he aimed to promote greater freedom of speech on the platform, which had previously been criticised for censoring people. 

But Silverman accused Musk in his new book of bending X’s algorithm to suit his own political agenda and promote his own posts. 

He said that following a 2am message from Musk’s cousin, James Musk, which called for engineers to debug ‘a high urgency… issue with engagement’ that saw 80 people rework the algorithm, X’s systems were made to ‘privilege Musk’s posts above all others’.

Silverman wrote: ‘The For You feed became a mirror of Musk’s interests, containing the right-wing accounts he followed’.

This week, Musk told his 226.5 million followers to cancel their Netflix subscriptions while blasting the streaming service was ‘pushing pro-transgender’ messages. 

The Tesla billionaire made the comments after discovering a cartoon that features a gay, transgender teenage boy and a bisexual autistic girl. 

The program, Dead End: Paranormal Park, premiered on the streaming platform in 2022 but was canceled after two seasons. It is still available on Netflix for kids as young as seven to watch. 

The series, directed by Hamish Steele, follows a main character named Barney who ran away to a Haunted House attraction to escape from his grandmother who does not accept him for being gay and transgender. 

Barney is accompanied by other characters, including Norma Khan, a bisexual girl who is also autistic. 

Although the show was given the boot, a clip from the series – when Barney shared that he is transgender – recently went viral after being shared by conservative activist account Libs of TikTok on X.

‘OMG. Dead End Paranormal Park, a show on Netflix, is pushing pro-transgender on CHILDREN,’ the group wrote. ‘This show is advertised for 7-YEAR-OLDS.’ 

Once the Tesla CEO got wind of the show’s content, he immediately condemned it. 

‘This is not ok,’ he said as he shared the group’s post exposing the show.

He then went on to make several more posts calling for people to cancel their subscriptions over the series.