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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.

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.

tlrobinson 4y ago
> I can't imagine what Twitter is doing with 1.25B in research. …and development. I assume “R&D” includes most of the engineers? Still, it could be a lot more lean for sure.
StillBored 4y ago
Well presumably that 1.25B is mostly engineering salaries since its "research and development" (for tax purposes where they probably get huge write offs). Anyway, they need that org to get their 1.8B in "cost of revenue" down, which is presumably mostly the cost of massive server farms to store what are mostly text mesages. Although these days with all the machine learning/etc to sell ads they probably "needs" all that hardware to run their models and can't just optimize it down to a higher perf system painting web pages.
- LegitShady 4y ago
  >mostly engineering salaries If the salaries are towards specific operational roles they'd be listed under "cost of revenue". If the salaries were for general duties not specific to an operational role they'd be under "general and administrative". Research and development needs to be for research and development. It could be for engineering salaries but those salaries would be towards research and development rather than operational duties.
  - StillBored 4y ago
    General engineering usually falls under the "development" category. The details may be state/country dependent. That said, even in stricter jurisdictions I know for sure that companies tend to group their engineering resources in such a way that they aren't justifying individual engineers (except maybe WRT timesheet filing) rather a bunch of people working on a "project" which meets the definition all get lumped together for purposes of R&D. Random google search, talking about how broad this can be: https://www.mossadams.com/articles/2021/03/company-qualifications-for-the-r-d-tax-credit https://www.mossadams.com/articles/2021/03/company-qualifica...
- missedthecue 4y ago
  What's the point of a tax write off if you lose $200 million a year?
williamsmj 4y ago
"Research and development" is engineering.

tlrobinson 4y ago

> I can't imagine what Twitter is doing with 1.25B in research. …and development. I assume “R&D” includes most of the engineers? Still, it could be a lot more lean for sure.

StillBored 4y ago

Well presumably that 1.25B is mostly engineering salaries since its "research and development" (for tax purposes where they probably get huge write offs). Anyway, they need that org to get their 1.8B in "cost of revenue" down, which is presumably mostly the cost of massive server farms to store what are mostly text mesages. Although these days with all the machine learning/etc to sell ads they probably "needs" all that hardware to run their models and can't just optimize it down to a higher perf system painting web pages.

LegitShady 4y ago
>mostly engineering salaries If the salaries are towards specific operational roles they'd be listed under "cost of revenue". If the salaries were for general duties not specific to an operational role they'd be under "general and administrative". Research and development needs to be for research and development. It could be for engineering salaries but those salaries would be towards research and development rather than operational duties.
- StillBored 4y ago
  General engineering usually falls under the "development" category. The details may be state/country dependent. That said, even in stricter jurisdictions I know for sure that companies tend to group their engineering resources in such a way that they aren't justifying individual engineers (except maybe WRT timesheet filing) rather a bunch of people working on a "project" which meets the definition all get lumped together for purposes of R&D. Random google search, talking about how broad this can be: https://www.mossadams.com/articles/2021/03/company-qualifications-for-the-r-d-tax-credit https://www.mossadams.com/articles/2021/03/company-qualifica...
missedthecue 4y ago
What's the point of a tax write off if you lose $200 million a year?

williamsmj 4y ago

"Research and development" is engineering.