Elon Musk goes private on Twitter to conduct test despite having 127 million followers

Twitter CEO Elon Musk recently set his account to private for a test, despite boasting over 127 million followers on the social media platform.

After a long “will he, won’t he” saga, Elon Musk completed his $44 billion deal to purchase Twitter late in October 2022.

A whole host of changes have gone live in the months since then, with mass layoffs hitting the company particularly hard.

In recent months, for example, users have regularly noticed bugs that impact the experience. Audio errors, playback hiccups, notification glitches, and so on continue to plague the platform. Now, Elon’s testing some of the errors on his personal account.

Elon Musk goes private on Twitter for a test

Today, February 1, 2023, Elon Musk set his personal account to private in an effort to test whether fellow users “see [his] private tweets more than [his] public ones.”

At the time of writing, then, more than half of Twitter’s user base is unable to see tweets from the CEO, whose follower counts tops 127 million people.

That Musk laid off the very people who would’ve previously conducted such a test isn’t lost on active Twitter users.

“Twitter’s algorithm is in such a poor state to the point the CEO has to do field experiments instead of, you know, an engineering department,” joked journalist Steve Vegvari.

Others were also quick to point out the humor in Elon Musk going private on Twitter.

Musk noted that he’ll remove the “protected” barrier from his account on the morning of February 2. If and when he plans on sharing the results of the test presently remains to be seen.