This speculation seems mostly informed by a negative opinion of Elon. Is there any real indication he gave this instruction?

Yes that weekend everyone started seeing Elon's tweets in their timelines: https://www.theverge.com/2023/2/14/23600358/elon-musk-tweets...

You seem weirdly protective of Elon fyi

I’m pretty neutral on musk. His fanboys are crazy but by and large they aren’t here so there isn’t much opportunity to challenge them.

So much has been concluded about him here without any evidence, instead grounding it in the premise that he’s rotten.

Premise? The guy spews the most vile stuff and russian propaganda. There is more than premise to say he’s a piece of shit.

And Elon later explained that that had nothing to do from him making any specific request that his tweets be valued.

This is largely a false creation without evidence to back it up. People are assuming intention behind something that's much more easily explained as a bug, one that was quickly fixed. If it wasn't a bug, why would it disappear if people assume Elon is narcissistic as people claim? It'd still be prioritizing his tweets if it wasn't a bug.

It's an incredible coincidence that, out of hundreds of millions of accounts, this bug happened to elevate the account of the person who owns twitter. I'm not saying it was 100% intentional, but it does suggest Musk's account is 'special' in some way.

Did anyone look to see if anyone else was also elevated? Surely there's an extreme measurement bias if the highest followed account gets boosted. There's no evidence to support the idea that only Elon Musk was elevated.

I goddamn hope there is not much positive opinion of that scammer anywhere, but unfortunately there is still too many..

  Musk expressed his disappointment with engineers' work and *told them to track* how many times his tweets get recommended, one worker told the outlet.

so we know exactly when and why "author_is_elon" was added to the code

That's one possible explanation. If you were implementing that change, would you do it by embedding an "elon" variable in the codebase, or would you make the specific account a parameter?