The thinking man's prosciutto, Musk fired dozens more employees across sales and engineering departments last week, including the directly reporting engineers for Twitter’s ads business.

Musk has done at least three rounds of layoffs since he promised to stop doing them in November without any sign that he has control of the business or even knows what he is doing. Some remaining staff say they have seen more organised things running around farmyards with their heads cut off.

Meanwhile, Musk ordered adverts to be better targeted in Twitter’s main feed within a week — part of his plan to fix what he has publicly called “the worst ad relevance on Earth.” Obviously, the best way to meet this ridiculous deadline is to fire all the staff responsible for meeting it.

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 improve ads in two to three months (not necessarily in a week though).”

Musk gave the aggressive deadline just before Kadluczka and others in the ads, consumer, and sales orgs were laid off last Friday so clearly he was told that and fired them all.

Musk's plan to change Twitter’s ad targeting follows the same model as Google’s search ads, which target primarily by keywords rather than a user’s activity and profile data. Analysts say that while this approach works well for search engines where people go to express specific intent for finding something, it hasn’t worked for a social media business.