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> The world will not stop while he figures out how to deal with the colossal ramifications of his own actions. And that will cost him even more. It seems unlik
by 908B64B197 3y ago
> The world will not stop while he figures out how to deal with the colossal ramifications of his own actions. And that will cost him even more.
It seems unlikely the company will ever turn a profit. It's crumbling under the weight of its own infrastructure (some question how it even still runs!).
Rumor has it they lacked the manpower to actually keep the API running and scrapping it was a last-ditch attempt at getting rid of bots. Same bots who flocked to the platform after the layoffs started since people in charge of mitigating these were fired.
Firing abuse and content moderation teams meant there was a lot more unsavory spam on the platform and advertisers didn't want any of it near their brand. In a few week Twitter lost half of it's top 100 biggest advertisers [0] and it doesn't seem they are coming back.
At this point, I'm wondering if not paying former employees, rent and cloud bills is a way of getting the company bankrupt with litigation, so he can later claim that it wasn't his fault that it went down but "all the rent-seekers conspiring against him".
To be fair, there were a lot of non-technical or "tech-adjacent" people from third tier business schools who seemed to think Musk was a genius for firing most of his "overpaid underproductive programmers" and will desperately try to imitate his every moves (probably trying to play the same games with employee severance and cloud bills). It'll be hilarious to see them crash and burn in the coming years (see Holmes, the Jobs copycat currently serving her sentence).
[0] https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advertisers-elon-musk-takeover-report-2022-11 https://www.businessinsider.com/twitter-lost-half-top-advert...
- jfengel 3y agoI find it remarkable that Twitter can't turn a profit. The core concept behind Twitter is a standard first project for any new framework. Obviously the real Twitter is as far removed from that as a Falcon 9 is from a model rocket. And I'm sure the real expenses of Twitter are all about managing the nine billion pies its got its fingers in, especially the massive hassles of moderation and placing advertisements. Still... it feels like it just shouldn't be anywhere near that expensive to fulfill the core, very simple purpose of Twitter.
- 908B64B197 3y ago> And I'm sure the real expenses of Twitter are all about managing the nine billion pies its got its fingers in, especially the massive hassles of moderation and placing advertisements. Exactly. > Still... it feels like it just shouldn't be anywhere near that expensive to fulfill the core, very simple purpose of Twitter. Fully interactive, user-generated content, number 4 website in the world by traffic... [0] At this scale people have issues like physical availability for inter-dc data transfer and site-reliability [1]. You are probably directly dealing with (several, since not a single one will be able to fulfill one whole order)OEMs to design server racks to your specifications. [2] [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_most_visited_websites [1] https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... [2] https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-yosemite-v3-platform-design-specification-1v16-pdf https://www.opencompute.org/documents/ocp-yosemite-v3-platfo...
- vGPU 3y agoTheir AWS deal in 2020 probably isn’t helping, nor the GCP deal in 2018. I shudder to think what their hosting costs must be. Apparently GCP is 200M/yr alone.