Nuked Hey everyone! As you may have heard, Elon Musk has been laying off Twitter employees, even after saying cuts were done. This has caused some confusion, so I’m here to give you the latest update.
Dozens of Twitter employees across sales and engineering departments were laid off last week, including one of Musk’s direct reports who was managing engineering for Twitter’s ads business, according to company sources and social media posts from affected employees seen by The Verge. This means Musk has done at least three rounds of layoffs since his promise to stop doing them in November.
It looks like one of the main focuses for Musk is to improve Twitter’s ads. His plan is to change Twitter’s ad targeting to work like Google’s search ads, which target primarily by keywords that are searched for, rather than a user’s activity and profile data. It’s an approach that works well for a search engine — where people go to express specific intent for finding something — and has helped Google build one of the most profitable businesses of all time. But it hasn’t worked for a social media business to date.
Marcin Kadluczka, the laid-off engineering manager for monetization who reported directly to Musk, hinted at the infeasibility of the one-week deadline in a tweet: “I believe Twitter can really improve ads in 2-3 months (no necessarily in a week though).” I’ve confirmed that Musk gave the aggressive deadline just before Kadluczka and others in the ads, consumer, and sales orgs were laid off last Friday.
It’s unclear if changing targeting to be keyword-driven like Google ads will actually improve the quality of Twitter’s advertising. Do you know more about what’s going on inside Twitter? I’d love to chat confidentially. You can reach me via [email protected] or through the contact form on my Linktree. Then we can set up a secure thread on Signal.
