Elon Musk Calls Instagram Model 'Excellent' As Twitter Tries To Fix 'Irrelevant' Ad Problem

Twitter CEO Elon Musk was all in praise of a rival platform's ad model on a live Spaces session early on Wednesday.

To include high-velocity features on Twitter, Musk suggested a "total rewrite" of Twitter’s code.

Musk exchanged sharp words with a former Twitter engineer called Ian Brown for asking a pointed question on the complexity of the existing Twitter code stack.

Read Also: Elon Musk Says He'll Resign As Twitter CEO Once This Happens

Comparing Twitter advertising to Meta Platforms Inc's META Instagram, Musk pointed out that he’d never come across anyone who had purchased anything on the microblogging site.

Musk called Instagram's advertising model “excellent” during the Spaces interaction.

Ad Revamp? “An ad that is highly relevant is content. An ad that is irrelevant is spam,” said Musk. “I see many ads, in fact, most ads, are not relevant,” said the owner of Twitter.

The entrepreneur however said that some progress has been made in that improving relevance of advertisements.

Musk said major advertisers are looking for investment. He said this approach was “rational.” He said the unnamed advertiser had informed him that Twitter’s ROI was the lowest.

The billionaire entrepreneur said an advertising model where people shell out $100 for a no-ad version of Twitter would be possible.

Cost Cuts: Musk said Twitter was on track to spend $5 billion next year but the huge cost-cutting initiated after he took over would result in the company breaking even on cash flow next year. He added that the employee count currently stands at 2,000 compared with almost 8,000 in October.

Photo: Created using images from TED Conference on Flickr