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()