Elon Musk laid off dozens of Twitter staffers last week — including those who worked on ad products — right after giving them a one-week deadline to turn around the company's ad business, according to a recent report from The Verge.
The publication said that Musk laid off employees in sales and engineering, marking the third round of major lay offs since Musk took over at the company in November.
Right before the lay offs, Musk told staff who work on Twitter's ad product to change how advertisements target users on their individual feeds, giving them a week to revamp it, The Verge reported. It's unclear whether the terminated employees were laid off as a result of missing the deadline.
The report comes after Musk has said Twitter has "the worst ad relevance on Earth" and apologized on social media for showing users "so many irrelevant and annoying ads."
"We're taking the (obvious) corrective action of tying ads to keywords & topics in tweets, like Google does with search," he said on Friday in a tweet. "This will improve contextual relevance dramatically."
Since taking Twitter private, Musk has laid off over half of the company's workforce. The billionaire is known for pushing for tight deadlines both at Twitter and at his other companies.
Marcin Kadluczka, one of the workers that was laid off in the company's latest round of termination, reported directly to Musk and oversaw the engineering behind Twitter's ads business, according to The Verge. After he left the company, Kadluczka tweeted about his termination and appeared to reference Musk's one-week deadline.
"I believe Twitter can really improve ads in 2-3 months (no necessarily in a week though)," he tweeted on Saturday. "Wish I could be actually fired not just deactivated."
—Marcin (@marcinkadluczka) February 19, 2023
A spokesperson for Twitter did not respond to a request for comment from Insider.
Ultimately, Musk's plan for Twitter's ad business appears to imitate ad-targeting methods used by Google, which shows users ads tied to keywords they've searched for on the platform.
