This engineer told Elon Musk his popularity is going down. Read what happened next

Following Musk's question in the meeting a lead engineer at Twitter showed him internal statistics and a Google Trends chart which suggested that the public's interest in Musk's antics appeared to be dwindling. Google Trends data showed that Elon Musk dominated search results in April 2022 with a score of 110, but that interest has since declined and is now at eight, reported Platformer.

After getting this ‘reality check’ Musk allegedly fired the engineer. An engineer informed Platformer that the Twitter CEO had also instructed staff to keep track of "how many times each of his tweets are suggested."

Further last month Insider reported that Twitter plans to let go of 50 employees in the product division soon bringing down the company’s total headcount to below 2,000.

New boss Musk took over Twitter in October in a $44 billion deal, and rolled out multiple product and organisational changes including Twitter-verified Blue check-mark as a paid service. Within weeks of joining, he also sacked half of the staff of the 7,500-strong workforce.

In November, Musk said that Twitter was facing "a massive drop in revenue" as advertisers dropped out. The social media platform’s revenue for the fourth quarter fell about 35 percent to $1.025 billion, a top ad executive revealed at a staff meeting, according to the Information.

More than 500 of Twitter's advertisers have paused spending on the micro blogging site since Elon Musk's takeover last year, according to its report. The social media company's daily revenue on Jan. 17 was 40 percent lower than the same day a year ago, the report added.

Staff cuts so far, which also included employees working in the content moderation division, have stoked fears of a surge in hate speech on the platform.