Elon Musk fires Twitter staff again despite promises of no more layoffs: Report
Elon Musk has reportedly directed staff to revamp the microblogging site’s ad targeting in a week.
Despite promising in November 2022 that there will be no more layoffs, Elon Musk has fired more employees from Twitter, as per a report in The Verge. Tech site The Information first reported about layoffs hitting the sales team last week. In the third round of job cuts since November, dozens of employees from the sales and engineering departments were affected.
Musk has reportedly directed staff to revamp the microblogging site’s ad targeting in a week to mimic Google’s search ads, which rely on keywords instead of a user’s activity and profile data. One of the fired workers, who reported directly to Musk and managed engineering for Twitter’s ads business, took to Twitter to share his opinion on improving the algorithm.
Marcin Kadluczka, who had been a Twitter employee for seven years, tweeted that it may be possible for the company to change how its ads work in two or three months, but not in a week - which was Musk’s deadline.
“Thank you tweeps. End of 7 years at Twitter! Elon musk for learnings and energy in last 3 months to improve Twitter and Ads! I believe Twitter can really improve ads in 2-3 months (no necessarily in a week though). Wish I could be actually fired not just deactivated,” he wrote.
Musk's aggressiveness to boost its ads business has invited criticism even from former Twitter ads chief Bruce Falck, who said the billionaire has no clue of what he is speaking about. To this, Musk replied that Twitter’s ad relevance was the ‘worst on Earth’.
"My apologies, you must be a genius, which is why Twitter has the worst ad relevance on Earth. Almost nobody buys anything on Twitter, but almost everyone on Instagram does. That is being fixed," the Tesla CEO wrote.
