Elon Musk 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 new 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

See Full Page