Elon Musk assembled the remaining Twitter employees at its San Francisco office on November 21st to announce that the company was no longer laying off staff after already dismissing around two-thirds of its workforce in a matter of weeks.
However, despite his claims, he has continued to fire people anyway.
Recently, several Twitter employees in the sales and engineering departments were let go, including a direct report of Musk who oversaw engineering for Twitter’s advertising business. This information was sourced from company insiders and social media posts made by affected employees that were reviewed by The Verge.
Since November, Musk has carried out a minimum of three rounds of layoffs, despite his previous assurance that the dismissals were over. In addition, he has given an internal directive to revamp how ads are targeted on Twitter’s main feed within a week, as part of his plan to address what he has publicly criticized as “the worst ad relevance on Earth.”
Sorry for showing you so many irrelevant & annoying ads on Twitter!
We’re taking the (obvious) corrective action of tying ads to keywords & topics in tweets, like Google does with search.
This will improve contextual relevance dramatically.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) February 17, 2023
Musk intends to change Twitter’s ad targeting approach to function similarly to Google’s search ads, which primarily target specific keywords searched for, rather than a user’s activity and profile data.
While this method has been effective for search engines, where users are searching for something specific, it has yet to prove successful for social media businesses.
Marcin Kadluczka, the engineering manager for monetization who was laid off and reported directly to Musk, hinted at the impracticality of the one-week deadline for revamping ad targeting in a tweet on Saturday.
He wrote, “I believe Twitter can really improve ads in 2-3 months (not necessarily in a week though).” The Verge confirmed that Musk issued the ambitious deadline just before Kadluczka and others in the ads, consumer, and sales departments were laid off last Friday.
It’s worth noting that Musk had given a similar deadline to revamp Twitter Blue when he first acquired the company, which was not met. Additionally, he may alter his stance on how ads should operate on Twitter. He is yet to respond to a request to comment.
