> Is this story real?

It was reported by Platformer¹, who starts the story by noting, "This story is based on interviews with people familiar with the events involved and supported by documents obtained by Platformer."

Here's Musk's meme tweet response: https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1625368108461613057

¹ https://www.platformer.news/p/yes-elon-musk-created-a-specia...

Also everyone reports this uncritically. As an example, if I were the boss and had identified that engagement was broken, demonstrated it, and an engineer suggested it was me being uninteresting rather than looking at the engineering problem I'd set him, it would at least be a mark against them.

If I were already identifying who to cut because of the worst economy I personally have experienced in my 40y, I'd likely fire in that situation.

Was that the situation? I'm not sure, but prior to this Elon took his tweets private for a day. That, coupled with stories from Taylor Lorenz re the view counter being experimentally synthetic (if true), lends credence to my theory.

But in general, if I see a lot of echoed hitpieces like this, I ascribe malice to the uncritical reporter. I have to have read ten articles about this, and all of them just parrot the allegation uncritically.