Elon Musk Fires More Twitter Employees In Sales, Engineering

Elon Musk continues to fire more employees from Twitter, this time from the sales and engineering departments, according to a report in The Verge. The latest round of layoffs included dozens of employees who were fired last week, the outlet further reported. One of them directly reported to Mr Musk and was managing Twitter's ads business. This is the third round of layoffs, said The Verge, despite Mr Musk promising employees at company's San Francisco headquarters in November that it won't happen anymore.

The billionaire has been aggressively pushing for the changes in the microblogging platform's algorithms. His plans is to change Twitter's ad targeting to work like Google's search ads, rather than user's activity and profile data, said the outlet.

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

He has given employees just one week to implement these changes, but Marcin Kadluczka - who directly reported to Mr Musk and was laid off on Friday - said in a tweet it's not feasible. "I believe Twitter can really improve ads in 2-3 months (no necessarily in a week though)," he said in a tweet.

Mr Musk's push to improve Twitter's ads has not really excited experts, including former Twitter ads head Bruce Falck who said the billionaire has no idea of what he is speaking about.

"As the former lead for Ads at Twitter, I can confidently say this man has no idea wtf he's talking about," he said in a tweet on Saturday.

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

Mr Musk hit back with a sarcastic reply. "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 Twitter chief wrote.

He has already announced that a higher-priced subscription to the microblogging platform with no ads will be available in the coming weeks.