Sources: Twitter laid off dozens of sales and engineering staff last week, as Elon Musk demands the site's ad targeting work like Google search ads in one week
He keeps laying people off anyway. — Dozens of Twitter employees across sales and engineering departments were laid off last week …
Dozens of remaining sales and engineering employees lose their jobs, directly contradicting the November pledge that hiring for those same functions had resumed.
Engineering teams now carry a hard deadline from Musk to make Twitter's ad targeting work like Google search ads within one week — an aggressive timeline set against Google's entrenched ad infrastructure.
Second-order effects
Cutting sales staff while demanding search-ad-grade targeting risks advertiser trust in exactly the revenue line the deadline targets, echoing the earlier pattern where over-cutting forced Twitter to rehire the people it needed.
With fewer engineers on the ad stack, the one-week mandate likely pushes remaining staff toward shortcuts and triage, making another round of 'we need those people back' reversals more probable.
Third-order effects
If the cycle holds — deep cuts, missed capability goals, rehiring — Twitter settles into a structure where headcount tracks one decision-maker's shifting deadlines rather than planned roadmaps, and the company's stated commitments stop functioning as signals to advertisers or candidates.
Chasing Google's intent-based ad model with a fraction of its engineering base points toward a longer-term question of whether Twitter can compete in performance advertising at all or cedes that market to incumbents.
The trend: Twitter under Musk is cycling through repeated layoff waves and reversals, with founder-set deadlines for matching rivals like Google substituting for deliberate product planning.
Musk laid off dozens of Twitter employees across sales and engineering last week. It's his third round of cuts since saying layoffs were done in November. Meanwhile, he has given those remaining a week to make ad targeting work like Google search ads https://www.theverge.com/...
twitter has been attempting to build a direct response ads business for nearly its entire existence BUT they never had a one-week deadline to motivate them before.... https://www.theverge.com/... https://twitter.com/...
@eric_seufert they've had fits and starts but I agree it wasn't the top priority — i do think there have been halfhearted attempts over the years though. (My main point is more about the time frame than the level of intensity of them trying over time)
I like that if you kind of squint your mind's eye you can see the hustle and grind memes he saw that inspired him to make these management decisions. An image of a weirdly muscular lion with “IT'S NOT IMPOSSIBLE, IT'S THAT NOBODY WAS STRONG ENOUGH TO ASK” over it in impact font. …
Ads perform badly on social media as opposed to search because search is a one and done action and you can be distracted from it after. Social media is ongoing and distractibility is low. No one has ever solved this problem.
Facebook sidestepped it for a while because of the size of its platform and the incredibly invasive targeting and profiling system they built. (And by straight up lying to advertisers.) No one else ever has. I've been saying it's unsolvable for a very long time.
@MikeIsaac Is he asking for a direct response business or contextual ad targeting based on content of nearby tweets? I thought it was the latter from his tweets.
What are the odds that this ends up with them trying to scam the advertisers into believing they have something that works? Like Facebook's BS autoplay metrics but much less believable? https://twitter.com/...
@MikeIsaac I'd push back on this. Twitter's management historically underinvested into ads infrastructure — they conscientiously avoided emulating Facebook & didn't adequately resource the ads product. Parag was no different. His first big decision as CEO was to fire the ads & pr…
Make it work like Google Ads... You can't. That's keyword based from search.. But you can easily 10x ARPU by allowing third-party data targeting back on, and just don't allow it for political/news ads. Oh and you can fix the broken lack of Boolean logic in targeting. https://twit…
@MikeIsaac Is he trying to built a direct response ad targeting system, à la Meta, or a contextual ad serving system more akin to Google AdWords. He needs to be very clear before he starts cracking the whip and threatening to sack people.