Without internal Twitter context, but having seen companies with marketing teams... there's a lot of people involved in doing close work with partners, whether advertisement ones or others. On the tech side it's kind of like AWS support - sure, everyone had access to the support portal, but once you start spending $$$, you'll get dedicated people sitting in your company's slack channel, providing support, advice and planning if you need it. (Sure, it doesn't always work great, but the idea holds) I'm sure that whoever was the big ad spender with Twitter has a dedicated contact reachable more directly. (And possibly negotiating better deals than advertised to everyone)

> a very slimy and backwards model

perhaps it is, but that's the business a lot of big tech is in. ads drive everything. google is an advertising company with a lot of data mining on the front-end.

if your ad game and monitization isn't tight then you don't have a company, you have a public service, and one that will gas out pretty quickly.

because advertising and marketing are still very much industries where your "face card" matters and where companies will spend millions of dollars elsewhere if Chet from Advertising gets laid off.

There was probably a lot of slack at twitter, but as an outsider it's incredibly hard to correctly identify who is the slack and who is doing real work (and a lot of people are somewhat in-between) in such a short amount of time. Musk took a massive risk and I'm sure a lot of the collateral damage were people doing genuine work.

Keep in mind a lot of the slacker are really good at pretending to do real work and they've had a long time to hone their skills.