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For context, Twitter‘S revenue in 2021 was $5 billion, on which they made a loss of $220 million.

tpmx 4y ago
Which is bizarre, in itself.
JohnJamesRambo 4y ago
What a great buy... I saw a tweet the other day that said they can't think of a worse purchase since Bank of America bought Countrywide for $40 billion. TWTR has traded flat since its inception in one of the greatest bull markets of all time.
- missedthecue 4y ago
  HP bought Autonomy which turned out to be a total fraud.
  - rasz 4y ago
    Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for almost $6B. $10K per user, instantly worthless.
sitkack 4y ago
When I think twitter, I think of a service that costs 5.2B to run.
- tpmx 4y ago
  I can't even fathom how it's possible to use $5B/yr to run Twitter. So, I co-architected the Opera Mini infrastructure. It peaked at a similar number of users (250-300M monthly active users). Sure, Twitter is much more DB-intensive, but transcoding web pages is pretty CPU intensive too, and typically we transcoded every single web page for them. Opera Mini was their only browser. Twitter is spending $5B/300M =~ $17/user per year I believe that from public sources, it's now possible to deduce that we spent less than a 1/100th of that per user/year, almost a decade ago. Since we didn't have crazy money, we optimized things at every step. Or, well, mostly avoided doing stupid stuff.
  - hguant 4y ago
    AWS instances don't pay for themselves /s...mostly
  - nikanj 4y ago
    People forget the key word ”premature” in the infamous Donald Knuth quote, and think all optimization is evil
    - pessimizer 4y ago
      It's always premature to optimize until your company is failing, because if you aren't failing yet it means it's worked so far. You should always wait until your company is falling apart to do a full rewrite of your core product.
      - rmbyrro 4y ago
        Exactly. When the business is failing is when there's lots of time and resources available to make your core product more efficient.
    - StillBored 4y ago
      Is not doing stupid s%$t an optimization? (lol) I'm reminded of the reddit articles a few years back when they were talking about moving to AWS and having to batch database requests to maintain their database perf. Apparently, at the time they were literally sending tens/hundreds of thousands of database queries for each page load request for a logged in user because each comment was collecting all its up/down votes and adding them up rather than just having a per comment karma attached to the comment. This is what happens when you hire a whole bunch of recent grads that frankly have no idea how to write code, and think they are the smartest people on the planet when it comes to distributed systems.
  - LegitShady 4y ago
    According to their financial disclosures for 2021: On income of ~$5.08B, they spent - $1.8B as "cost of revenue" (costs incurred to run their business), - $1.25B on "research and development", - $1.2B on "Sales and Marketing", and - ~$1.3B together on "general and administrative" (overhead) and "litigation settlement". Then there are a bunch of small monies related to interest expense and income, etc etc. They're spending huge amounts of money and could be profitable if they really wanted. I can't imagine what Twitter is doing with 1.25B in research. Elon could make Twitter profitable simply by cutting their research department.
- l33t2328 4y ago
  There are some tongue in cheek answers but actually how does it cost that much to run? That’s a ton of money for a website that is very text heavy with short/low quality videos and a largely fixed feature set.
  - viraptor 4y ago
    People. Salaries are expensive, especially SV salaries. Then you need well paid management for the extra heads, and group manager for them. IIRC (feel free to correct me, I'm not going to dig it out again) they spent >$1B on R&D itself... which is pretty much just couple hundred of engineers who, (judging from the service changes recently) mostly did nothing.

tpmx 4y ago

Which is bizarre, in itself.

What a great buy... I saw a tweet the other day that said they can't think of a worse purchase since Bank of America bought Countrywide for $40 billion. TWTR has traded flat since its inception in one of the greatest bull markets of all time.

missedthecue 4y ago
HP bought Autonomy which turned out to be a total fraud.
- rasz 4y ago
  Cuban sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for almost $6B. $10K per user, instantly worthless.

sitkack 4y ago

When I think twitter, I think of a service that costs 5.2B to run.

tpmx 4y ago
I can't even fathom how it's possible to use $5B/yr to run Twitter. So, I co-architected the Opera Mini infrastructure. It peaked at a similar number of users (250-300M monthly active users). Sure, Twitter is much more DB-intensive, but transcoding web pages is pretty CPU intensive too, and typically we transcoded every single web page for them. Opera Mini was their only browser. Twitter is spending $5B/300M =~ $17/user per year I believe that from public sources, it's now possible to deduce that we spent less than a 1/100th of that per user/year, almost a decade ago. Since we didn't have crazy money, we optimized things at every step. Or, well, mostly avoided doing stupid stuff.
- hguant 4y ago
  AWS instances don't pay for themselves /s...mostly
- nikanj 4y ago
  People forget the key word ”premature” in the infamous Donald Knuth quote, and think all optimization is evil
  - pessimizer 4y ago
    It's always premature to optimize until your company is failing, because if you aren't failing yet it means it's worked so far. You should always wait until your company is falling apart to do a full rewrite of your core product.
    - rmbyrro 4y ago
      Exactly. When the business is failing is when there's lots of time and resources available to make your core product more efficient.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    Is not doing stupid s%$t an optimization? (lol) I'm reminded of the reddit articles a few years back when they were talking about moving to AWS and having to batch database requests to maintain their database perf. Apparently, at the time they were literally sending tens/hundreds of thousands of database queries for each page load request for a logged in user because each comment was collecting all its up/down votes and adding them up rather than just having a per comment karma attached to the comment. This is what happens when you hire a whole bunch of recent grads that frankly have no idea how to write code, and think they are the smartest people on the planet when it comes to distributed systems.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  According to their financial disclosures for 2021: On income of ~$5.08B, they spent - $1.8B as "cost of revenue" (costs incurred to run their business), - $1.25B on "research and development", - $1.2B on "Sales and Marketing", and - ~$1.3B together on "general and administrative" (overhead) and "litigation settlement". Then there are a bunch of small monies related to interest expense and income, etc etc. They're spending huge amounts of money and could be profitable if they really wanted. I can't imagine what Twitter is doing with 1.25B in research. Elon could make Twitter profitable simply by cutting their research department.
l33t2328 4y ago
There are some tongue in cheek answers but actually how does it cost that much to run? That’s a ton of money for a website that is very text heavy with short/low quality videos and a largely fixed feature set.
- viraptor 4y ago
  People. Salaries are expensive, especially SV salaries. Then you need well paid management for the extra heads, and group manager for them. IIRC (feel free to correct me, I'm not going to dig it out again) they spent >$1B on R&D itself... which is pretty much just couple hundred of engineers who, (judging from the service changes recently) mostly did nothing.