7 ms·

I don't think it will fail on a technical level. As this article says lots of engineering has gone in to make the thing pretty resilient. I would also say that

I don't think it will fail on a technical level. As this article says lots of engineering has gone in to make the thing pretty resilient. I would also say that there are still enough engineers who work there who can figure out what's gone wrong and "turn it on and off again" or w/e makes it splutter back to life. In terms of changes to the Platform ditto. It's not difficult to make these changes that a team of 100's of devs who are not 100% aware of what's there already can't figure it out. I've taken over systems that I knew very little of and were pretty big (not as big as twitter) and I managed for years to make changes without drastically breaking stuff. In any event if they do break stuff they will be able to fix what they have broken. No, the real failure here is the massive debt burden and the fact that there is no way that twitter can ever service that amount of debt. Note that before EM took over it was ticking along with a relatively small loss. If they had cut headcount by maybe 10% they would have been break even easily. There is no way that's possible with $4million of interest per day. They have to radically change the way they monetise the platform to get to that level. I don't think they will ever get there and Musk will sell off at a bargain basement price at some point in the future to pay back the debt.

_3u10 4y ago
If you consider that engineers cost about $1000 a day and he got rid of 4,000 of them… oddly it works out to about $4 million per day. I’m not an expert in math but it’s seems pretty possible. Plus they’ll have a lot more impressions to sell now that people are allowed to speak. Ad rates might drop but then someone will write an article about how they are getting great CPC on Twitter and everything will be back to normal after the blue checks have their sob fest.
- watt 4y ago
  Dead cat bounce. Engineers are paid $1000 a day because they create value to the tune of $10 000 a day. So maybe you saved $4 million a day in very short term, but now the momentum is gone, and soon you will not be earning $40 million a day from the value that now was not being created, just in a "few" short months. I wish Elon the best, but he could have hired his own team of "hardcore" engineers and put them to work 80 hours a week, spending a fraction of the price that was paid. What a waste.
  - throwuwu 4y ago
    SWE are not assembly line workers, they are the people that build the automated assembly line. It’ll keep functioning well enough without them and with a much smaller team performing maintenance. I’d even bet on new feature being released faster now that they’ll be owned by highly motivated individuals instead of committees of managers and randomly assigned engs.
    - saagarjha 4y ago
      Ok, but who is going to improve the automated assembly now?
    - lupire 4y ago
      Yes, features are being released faster, and rolled back faster due to bugs and mismanagement, approaching infinite angular velocity of feature flips.
  - concordDance 4y ago
    > Engineers are paid $1000 a day because they create value to the tune of $10 000 a day. If this was true then either the non-engineers in twitter have been destroying many times their salary in value or twitter has been obscenely profitable these last few years.
- pjc50 4y ago
  > allowed to speak Advertisers have already said they don't want their ads screenshot next to slurs.
andreyk 4y ago
Yep, agree. Twitter's revenue was primarily from ads, and now I'd bet their ads revenue has dropped a huge amount. Given how Musk is behaving now (reinstating Trump etc.), and losing many pivotal sales people, and the firing of a ton of people in charge of dealing with hate speech and such, it seems unlikely advertisers will return now.
- _3u10 4y ago
  I don’t think given their ad sales that the sales people were that pivotal.
  - hnbad 4y ago
    As I understand it, most of the ad slots were sold at a yearly sales event. This time most advertisers were cautious because the company couldn't respond to questions of how Elon Musk's takeover would affect the company (and specifically the type of content alongside which the ads would appear) as this was happening before he took over but after the sale was practically a done deal. This left them with only a fraction of the ad slots "pre-sold" compared to a normal year. Additionally it seems a lot of advertisers have cautioned their ad departments to halt spending on Twitter ads for now because they're still unclear about wtf Elon Musk is up to (not to mention the mass impersonation fiasco that allegedly resulted in share prices of several companies being affected negatively). It's not just sales people, Twitter seems to have gotten rid of most of its external communications people to the point where journalists can't even find anyone to ask for statements other than Elon Musk himself (which may be intentional given that he likes to present himself as the face of his companies). But if Twitter's ad sales really did rely so much on these sales events, I'd wager that the sales people largely existed to communicate directly with long-standing big-spend advertising partners. It's hard to overstate how much these types of deals hinge on "social glue" rather than cold hard numbers (which can be interpreted/reframed to be interpreted however you want as long as both sides are happy).
    - hackerlight 4y ago
      "Additionally it seems a lot of advertisers have cautioned their ad departments to halt spending" What percentage? Big difference between 0.03 and 0.3.
larsnystrom 4y ago
Are you saying Twitter is paying ~$1.5B in interest rates every year?
- andy_ppp 4y ago
  I hear $1bn quoted but maybe $1.5nm is accurate.
  - stavros 4y ago
    > maybe $1.5nm is accurate Nanometers?
    - ehnto 4y ago
      Newton meters I think.
    - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
      Nanomillions.
- unculture 4y ago
  It’s going to be something like that. He bought it for 44 billion. That was mostly loans. Those loans are transferred to the company and the company pays interest on them.
  - jasode 4y ago
    >He bought it for 44 billion. That was mostly loans. That's not true if media reports about the purchase was accurate. The debt financing was only $13 billion: https://www.google.com/search?q=musk+buys+twitter+%22%2413+billion%22+debt https://www.google.com/search?q=musk+buys+twitter+%22%2413+b... The more complete funding structure[1] looked like this: + $24 billion : Elon Musk personal wealth (e.g. selling some of his TESLA stock to raise money) + $7 billion : other equity investors (Saudi Arabia prince, Larry Ellison, etc.) + $13 billion: bank loans The Twitter puchase was mostly Elon's personal money (~54%) and not debt. [1] https://archive.ph/L6Mhv https://archive.ph/L6Mhv
Moissanite 4y ago
The fact that he was able to "buy" Twitter and yet transfer a significant amount of debt to the company rather than being liable himself is just another sign of how different "rich people accounting" is. He will walk away from this with a bit less theoretical money but no material impact to his life, while thousands of people are having their lives up-ended. How long are we going to keep letting shit like this happen?
- drcross 4y ago
  Debts from where? Any evidence of this at all? It seems like fantasy considering how much money the rest of Musks companies have in the bank.
  - hef19898 4y ago
    There is Elon's private wealth, mostly in tesla stock from what I understand. The cash and assets from the companies at which he is (majority) owner, CEO or a combination thereof are not his, they belong to his companies, which are separate legal entities.
  - bandrami 4y ago
    LOL no. Rich people don't have money, they own companies. In fact they go to nearly absurd lengths to avoid having money as much as possible.
  - pjc50 4y ago
    https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/banking/2022/10/09/why-morgan-stanley-and-other-banks-arranging-the-musk-twitter-deal-face-a-500m-loss/ https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/banking/2022/10/09/... "Lenders that also include Bank of America, Barclays and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group committed to provide $13 billion of debt financing for the deal. Their losses would amount to $500 million or more if the debt were to be sold now, according to Bloomberg calculations."
- guiriduro 4y ago
  Yeah I love it. I would like to "buy" a multi-million dollar mansion in the Bahamas with big bank money, but have the bank only encumber the property itself, and I get to live in it and pay service staff for my luxury, maybe the odd AirBnB letting to maintain the occasional pretense of repayment, up until the time 'it' can't sustain 'itself' and I walk away debt-free. But apparently I'm not a rich person so that kind of accounting doesn't apply to me.
kaputmi 4y ago
Personnel was their biggest cost, which has now been cut by 60+%. That will help a bit in servicing the debt

_3u10 4y ago

If you consider that engineers cost about $1000 a day and he got rid of 4,000 of them… oddly it works out to about $4 million per day. I’m not an expert in math but it’s seems pretty possible. Plus they’ll have a lot more impressions to sell now that people are allowed to speak. Ad rates might drop but then someone will write an article about how they are getting great CPC on Twitter and everything will be back to normal after the blue checks have their sob fest.

watt 4y ago
Dead cat bounce. Engineers are paid $1000 a day because they create value to the tune of $10 000 a day. So maybe you saved $4 million a day in very short term, but now the momentum is gone, and soon you will not be earning $40 million a day from the value that now was not being created, just in a "few" short months. I wish Elon the best, but he could have hired his own team of "hardcore" engineers and put them to work 80 hours a week, spending a fraction of the price that was paid. What a waste.
- throwuwu 4y ago
  SWE are not assembly line workers, they are the people that build the automated assembly line. It’ll keep functioning well enough without them and with a much smaller team performing maintenance. I’d even bet on new feature being released faster now that they’ll be owned by highly motivated individuals instead of committees of managers and randomly assigned engs.
  - saagarjha 4y ago
    Ok, but who is going to improve the automated assembly now?
  - lupire 4y ago
    Yes, features are being released faster, and rolled back faster due to bugs and mismanagement, approaching infinite angular velocity of feature flips.
- concordDance 4y ago
  > Engineers are paid $1000 a day because they create value to the tune of $10 000 a day. If this was true then either the non-engineers in twitter have been destroying many times their salary in value or twitter has been obscenely profitable these last few years.
pjc50 4y ago
> allowed to speak Advertisers have already said they don't want their ads screenshot next to slurs.

andreyk 4y ago

Yep, agree. Twitter's revenue was primarily from ads, and now I'd bet their ads revenue has dropped a huge amount. Given how Musk is behaving now (reinstating Trump etc.), and losing many pivotal sales people, and the firing of a ton of people in charge of dealing with hate speech and such, it seems unlikely advertisers will return now.

_3u10 4y ago
I don’t think given their ad sales that the sales people were that pivotal.
- hnbad 4y ago
  As I understand it, most of the ad slots were sold at a yearly sales event. This time most advertisers were cautious because the company couldn't respond to questions of how Elon Musk's takeover would affect the company (and specifically the type of content alongside which the ads would appear) as this was happening before he took over but after the sale was practically a done deal. This left them with only a fraction of the ad slots "pre-sold" compared to a normal year. Additionally it seems a lot of advertisers have cautioned their ad departments to halt spending on Twitter ads for now because they're still unclear about wtf Elon Musk is up to (not to mention the mass impersonation fiasco that allegedly resulted in share prices of several companies being affected negatively). It's not just sales people, Twitter seems to have gotten rid of most of its external communications people to the point where journalists can't even find anyone to ask for statements other than Elon Musk himself (which may be intentional given that he likes to present himself as the face of his companies). But if Twitter's ad sales really did rely so much on these sales events, I'd wager that the sales people largely existed to communicate directly with long-standing big-spend advertising partners. It's hard to overstate how much these types of deals hinge on "social glue" rather than cold hard numbers (which can be interpreted/reframed to be interpreted however you want as long as both sides are happy).
  - hackerlight 4y ago
    "Additionally it seems a lot of advertisers have cautioned their ad departments to halt spending" What percentage? Big difference between 0.03 and 0.3.

larsnystrom 4y ago

Are you saying Twitter is paying ~$1.5B in interest rates every year?

andy_ppp 4y ago
I hear $1bn quoted but maybe $1.5nm is accurate.
- stavros 4y ago
  > maybe $1.5nm is accurate Nanometers?
  - ehnto 4y ago
    Newton meters I think.
  - FartyMcFarter 4y ago
    Nanomillions.
unculture 4y ago
It’s going to be something like that. He bought it for 44 billion. That was mostly loans. Those loans are transferred to the company and the company pays interest on them.
- jasode 4y ago
  >He bought it for 44 billion. That was mostly loans. That's not true if media reports about the purchase was accurate. The debt financing was only $13 billion: https://www.google.com/search?q=musk+buys+twitter+%22%2413+billion%22+debt https://www.google.com/search?q=musk+buys+twitter+%22%2413+b... The more complete funding structure[1] looked like this: + $24 billion : Elon Musk personal wealth (e.g. selling some of his TESLA stock to raise money) + $7 billion : other equity investors (Saudi Arabia prince, Larry Ellison, etc.) + $13 billion: bank loans The Twitter puchase was mostly Elon's personal money (~54%) and not debt. [1] https://archive.ph/L6Mhv https://archive.ph/L6Mhv

Moissanite 4y ago

The fact that he was able to "buy" Twitter and yet transfer a significant amount of debt to the company rather than being liable himself is just another sign of how different "rich people accounting" is. He will walk away from this with a bit less theoretical money but no material impact to his life, while thousands of people are having their lives up-ended. How long are we going to keep letting shit like this happen?

drcross 4y ago
Debts from where? Any evidence of this at all? It seems like fantasy considering how much money the rest of Musks companies have in the bank.
- hef19898 4y ago
  There is Elon's private wealth, mostly in tesla stock from what I understand. The cash and assets from the companies at which he is (majority) owner, CEO or a combination thereof are not his, they belong to his companies, which are separate legal entities.
- bandrami 4y ago
  LOL no. Rich people don't have money, they own companies. In fact they go to nearly absurd lengths to avoid having money as much as possible.
- pjc50 4y ago
  https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/banking/2022/10/09/why-morgan-stanley-and-other-banks-arranging-the-musk-twitter-deal-face-a-500m-loss/ https://www.thenationalnews.com/business/banking/2022/10/09/... "Lenders that also include Bank of America, Barclays and Mitsubishi UFJ Financial Group committed to provide $13 billion of debt financing for the deal. Their losses would amount to $500 million or more if the debt were to be sold now, according to Bloomberg calculations."
guiriduro 4y ago
Yeah I love it. I would like to "buy" a multi-million dollar mansion in the Bahamas with big bank money, but have the bank only encumber the property itself, and I get to live in it and pay service staff for my luxury, maybe the odd AirBnB letting to maintain the occasional pretense of repayment, up until the time 'it' can't sustain 'itself' and I walk away debt-free. But apparently I'm not a rich person so that kind of accounting doesn't apply to me.

kaputmi 4y ago

Personnel was their biggest cost, which has now been cut by 60+%. That will help a bit in servicing the debt