Musk's fiefdom: Twitter CEO continues to fire people randomly, give aggressive, arbitrary deadlines

When he took control of Twitter, one of Elon Musk’s first order of business was to trim the pool of people working for the social media company down, drastically and quickly. Next, he went on a termination spree and revamped Twitter’s workforce in such a way that almost two-thirds of the employees were either terminated or left on their own accord. Elon Musk assembled Twitter’s surviving employees at its San Francisco headquarters on November 21st to inform them that layoffs had ended. Nonetheless, he continues to lay people off, at times out of whim and for bizarre reasons. Also read: Elon Musk fires Twitter engineer for falling engagement on his personal profile According to corporate insiders and social media posts from affected workers, dozens of Twitter employees across sales and engineering divisions were laid off last week, including one of Musk’s direct subordinates who was handling engineering for Twitter’s advertisements business.

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

This implies Musk has carried out at least three rounds of layoffs after promising not to do so in November. Meanwhile, he has issued an internal mandate to redesign how adverts are targeted in Twitter’s main feed within a week. Musk’s idea is to modify Twitter’s ad targeting to function more like Google’s search advertisements, which target mostly based on terms searched for rather than a user’s activity and profile data.

As the former lead for Ads at Twitter, I can confidently say this man has no idea wtf he's talking about https://t.co/Hw4TfkFNJH

— bruce falck (@boo) February 17, 2023

It’s a strategy that works well for a search engine, where people go to express explicit intent to discover something and has helped Google develop one of the most successful corporations in history. Such an approach is yet to work for a social media platform. Marcin Kadluczka, the laid-off engineering manager for monetization who worked directly under Musk, hinted to the impossibility of the one-week target in a tweet on Saturday: “I believe Twitter can truly enhance advertisements in 2-3 months (but not necessarily in a week).” Also read: Elon Musk fires engineer who publicly called out Musk and his lies about Twitter’s performance Musk has prioritised improving Twitter advertisements since acquiring the firm. He is true in stating that Twitter’s advertising are less tailored and effective than those of its competitors. Nevertheless, as others with a greater grasp of the trade-offs than me have pointed out, it’s uncertain whether altering targeting to be keyword-driven like Google advertisements would truly increase the quality of Twitter’s advertising: Read all the  Latest News,  Trending News,  Cricket News,  Bollywood News, India News and  Entertainment News here. Follow us on  Facebook,  Twitter and  Instagram.