5 ms·

Twitter has over $5B in annual revenue, it will be fine.

by j0hnyl 4y ago

phailhaus 4y ago
It only managed that in 2021, and still recorded a loss of $221M. In 2020 it made $3.7B, so the 2021 bump may have been pandemic-driven. [1] [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/
- com2kid 4y ago
  Lay off 1000 employees and start cutting or renegotiating vendor contracts. 221M should be easy money to find for a company of Twitter's size. I say this as someone whose been a big tech co employee my entire life and who has seen how easily 10 or 20 million gets spent. I have also seen how easily a million gets thrown out here or there for vendors to do some data analysis work, or even worse, create shiny powerpoint slides to present to higher ups. Remove a layer of management, stop all the outsourced make-work, and you may end up halfway there to saving 200 million.
  - jsnell 4y ago
    Musk has saddled Twitter with a lot of debt as part of this deal. The interest on that debt is about $1 billion / year. So they don't need to just find $200M, they need to find $1.2B. Does it still sound easy?
    - com2kid 4y ago
      1.2B is a bit harder, yeah. I guess I should have stated that Twitter could have been profitable awhile back, and it was likely a choice they made to not be. Not sure why they made that choice, and it seems like everyone who does know why no longer works there. My overall point was that large corporations have a lot of waste in them, entire teams dedicated to making shiny dashboards for execs who only ever look at them once or twice a year, or, something I saw at Microsoft, hiring vendors to write software, and also hiring another vending firm to manage the first vending firm. (Because MS, despite being filled with program managers and software developers, wasn't set up at the time to do short term projects so the easiest solution to that organizational problem was to flush a few million extra down the tubes...)
dkarras 4y ago
Revenue means nothing. If I sold $10 bills for $9 each, I'd have billions in revenue in a week. The path to breakeven here will be long and arduous, impossible if for some reason twitter gets the facebook treatment from the population. Musk himself is doing his best to make twitter look "not cool". He is losing his bearings fast and probably thinks twitter is the way it is because of some conspiracy in management. He shut down his own "free speech absolutist" stance pretty quickly post acquisition. If he has his way, many people will not comfortable associating themselves with twitter (what happened to facebook) and well, without enough users / activity to make it your while, twitter's future looks bleak unless Musk regains his bearings somehow. And what if something new and fresh comes along in the meantime that gains traction? Twitter, and the concept is old. People want to communicate, want to be heard and become influential - this will never change, but the medium can change and it can change relatively fast. Twitter is a 75% squeezed lemon, has some life in it but Musk is set on wasting it thinking it is a staple like telephone / email is.

Twitter has over $5B in annual revenue, it will be fine.

by j0hnyl 4y ago

Twitter has over $5B in annual revenue, it will be fine.

It only managed that in 2021, and still recorded a loss of $221M. In 2020 it made $3.7B, so the 2021 bump may have been pandemic-driven. [1] [1] https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/ https://www.businessofapps.com/data/twitter-statistics/

com2kid 4y ago
Lay off 1000 employees and start cutting or renegotiating vendor contracts. 221M should be easy money to find for a company of Twitter's size. I say this as someone whose been a big tech co employee my entire life and who has seen how easily 10 or 20 million gets spent. I have also seen how easily a million gets thrown out here or there for vendors to do some data analysis work, or even worse, create shiny powerpoint slides to present to higher ups. Remove a layer of management, stop all the outsourced make-work, and you may end up halfway there to saving 200 million.
- jsnell 4y ago
  Musk has saddled Twitter with a lot of debt as part of this deal. The interest on that debt is about $1 billion / year. So they don't need to just find $200M, they need to find $1.2B. Does it still sound easy?
  - com2kid 4y ago
    1.2B is a bit harder, yeah. I guess I should have stated that Twitter could have been profitable awhile back, and it was likely a choice they made to not be. Not sure why they made that choice, and it seems like everyone who does know why no longer works there. My overall point was that large corporations have a lot of waste in them, entire teams dedicated to making shiny dashboards for execs who only ever look at them once or twice a year, or, something I saw at Microsoft, hiring vendors to write software, and also hiring another vending firm to manage the first vending firm. (Because MS, despite being filled with program managers and software developers, wasn't set up at the time to do short term projects so the easiest solution to that organizational problem was to flush a few million extra down the tubes...)

dkarras 4y ago

Revenue means nothing. If I sold $10 bills for $9 each, I'd have billions in revenue in a week. The path to breakeven here will be long and arduous, impossible if for some reason twitter gets the facebook treatment from the population. Musk himself is doing his best to make twitter look "not cool". He is losing his bearings fast and probably thinks twitter is the way it is because of some conspiracy in management. He shut down his own "free speech absolutist" stance pretty quickly post acquisition. If he has his way, many people will not comfortable associating themselves with twitter (what happened to facebook) and well, without enough users / activity to make it your while, twitter's future looks bleak unless Musk regains his bearings somehow. And what if something new and fresh comes along in the meantime that gains traction? Twitter, and the concept is old. People want to communicate, want to be heard and become influential - this will never change, but the medium can change and it can change relatively fast. Twitter is a 75% squeezed lemon, has some life in it but Musk is set on wasting it thinking it is a staple like telephone / email is.