Elon Musk continues to demonstrate his great leadership skills at Twitter… by firing more workers. When he’s not busy introducing algorithm changes that make his own tweets more visible to the entire social network or removing security features from the app, Musk has a peculiar “habit” of firing Twitter employees.
If the massive layoffs of his staff last November or the arbitrary firing of engineers for not telling him what he wants to hear seemed to indicate that Elon Musk would not make any more layoffs for the simple reason that there are only “four cats” left, the owner of Tesla has shown us once again that things can always be made worse.
Elon Musk would have carried out at least three rounds of layoffs in recent days in order to “get rid” of much of the staff responsible for managing advertising on Twitter. Those affected, according to The Verge, are dozens of employees in the sales and engineering departments, including the main responsible for advertising on the social network.
Before these layoffs occurred, Musk gave the internal directive to revamp how advertising is segmented in the Twitter feed in less than a week. “We’re sorry for showing you so many irrelevant and annoying ads on Twitter. We are taking the (obvious) corrective measure of linking ads to keywords and topics in tweets, like Google does with search. This will dramatically improve contextual relevance,” Musk said on his Twitter account.
In a tweet following his dismissal, Twitter’s former director of monetization engineering, Marcin Kadluczka, hinted this Saturday at the absolute unfeasibility of the deadline set by Musk: “I think Twitter can actually improve ads in 2-3 months (though not necessarily in a week).” The recent layoffs would have taken place shortly after Elon Musk gave this deadline to his employees, according to sources consulted by The Verge.
Thus, Twitter’s most senior staff (those who know best the “guts” of the social network) is forced to leave a company where its current owner does not know and does not want to know how to manage a social network for the service of everyone, including the advertisers that maintain it. Will we see in 2023 the end of Twitter?
