Attending the Super Bowl as a guest of Rupert Murdoch, Musk had one of the most luxurious seats in the house, but rather than watching the game, he was glued to his phone in dismay. Both he and President Biden had sent tweets cheering on the Philadelphia Eagles, but even though Biden had far fewer followers than Musk on the platform, the president’s tweet garnered 29 mil- lion views to Musk’s 8.4 million. Livid, Musk demanded that his engineers find out why his tweet was under-performing Biden’s. He left the game early to fly back to his San Francisco office, where dozens of employees were summoned to meet him on a Sun- day night. Eventually, to placate their boss, the engineers tweaked Twitter’s algorithm to boost Musk’s posts, pushing them into users’ feeds whether they follow him or not. “In effect, Musk’s tweets would have higher priority over any other post,” write Conger and Mac, technology reporters for The New York Times. As they put it toward the end of the book, “A man allergic to criticism had bought himself the largest audience in the world, and hoped for praise” No wonder he and Trump get along,

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Notices where this attachment appears