Elon Musk axed an X engineer after they told the emperor why his posts were flopping, a new book claims. “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. “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... Musk then reportedly told the engineer, “You’re fired, you’re fired.”