3 ms·

The claim that twitter spends 2B a year on hosting needs a very good source.

rgbrenner 3y ago
I rounded up but Elon says it's $1.5B/year: https://twitter.com/pandrewhk/status/1605494601673891840 https://twitter.com/pandrewhk/status/1605494601673891840
- breakingcups 3y ago
  Sadly the least reliable source.
- Zigurd 3y ago
  That's a plausible number. Pre-Elon Twitter's ARPU was $4-5, with about 500M users. If Twitter pays $1.5B to support 0.5B users, they about break even after other costs. ARPU is very deceptive for evaluating ad revenue since regions pay very differently, but OK for this purpose.
saurik 3y ago
I mean we just learned this month that Twitter is paying hundreds of millions of dollars every year to Google Cloud (as part of the bill Elon decided he didn't want to pay) so is $2B really that strange, given that I also thought we knew Twitter isn't spending a majority of its money with Google? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-21/twitter-resumes-paying-google-cloud-patching-up-relationship https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-21/twitter-r... Regardless, I did a Google search for "twitter hosting costs" and it turns out Elon supposedly said on some call in December that they were spending $1.5B/year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116454 Maybe you don't trust that, but it was widely reported that he wanted it cut by $1B, so it would be difficult to square it up any other way at that point. https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-infrastructure-costs-by-1-bln-sources-2022-11-03/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-i... Now, maybe we also generally don't trust Elon as a source for any of these numbers (and I am starting to become suspicious of his use of "1.5 billion" to mean "a lot, but specific enough to avoid sounding like an off the cuff lie"); but again: it doesn't seem strange given the other information we learned this month... and, frankly, since we are looking at Elon's decision not to pay $5M we simply get to analyze all other facts by accepting them from Elon if it undermines his own point as we are actually being charitable by accepting his own numbers and quoting them back to him. So like, given that it took way more typing for you to throw shade/FUD at the $2B number than it did for me to get what I think is a more than reasonable level of verification, can you explain why your prior was so strong against this number that you felt that someone saying $2B was super unreasonable but you calling them out on it without any explanation is fine? It just sucks that it is so easy to make people doubt a fact with nothing more than a strong challenge for a source.

I rounded up but Elon says it's $1.5B/year: https://twitter.com/pandrewhk/status/1605494601673891840 https://twitter.com/pandrewhk/status/1605494601673891840

breakingcups 3y ago
Sadly the least reliable source.
Zigurd 3y ago
That's a plausible number. Pre-Elon Twitter's ARPU was $4-5, with about 500M users. If Twitter pays $1.5B to support 0.5B users, they about break even after other costs. ARPU is very deceptive for evaluating ad revenue since regions pay very differently, but OK for this purpose.

saurik 3y ago

I mean we just learned this month that Twitter is paying hundreds of millions of dollars every year to Google Cloud (as part of the bill Elon decided he didn't want to pay) so is $2B really that strange, given that I also thought we knew Twitter isn't spending a majority of its money with Google? https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-21/twitter-resumes-paying-google-cloud-patching-up-relationship https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2023-06-21/twitter-r... Regardless, I did a Google search for "twitter hosting costs" and it turns out Elon supposedly said on some call in December that they were spending $1.5B/year. https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116454 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=34116454 Maybe you don't trust that, but it was widely reported that he wanted it cut by $1B, so it would be difficult to square it up any other way at that point. https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-infrastructure-costs-by-1-bln-sources-2022-11-03/ https://www.reuters.com/technology/musk-orders-twitter-cut-i... Now, maybe we also generally don't trust Elon as a source for any of these numbers (and I am starting to become suspicious of his use of "1.5 billion" to mean "a lot, but specific enough to avoid sounding like an off the cuff lie"); but again: it doesn't seem strange given the other information we learned this month... and, frankly, since we are looking at Elon's decision not to pay $5M we simply get to analyze all other facts by accepting them from Elon if it undermines his own point as we are actually being charitable by accepting his own numbers and quoting them back to him. So like, given that it took way more typing for you to throw shade/FUD at the $2B number than it did for me to get what I think is a more than reasonable level of verification, can you explain why your prior was so strong against this number that you felt that someone saying $2B was super unreasonable but you calling them out on it without any explanation is fine? It just sucks that it is so easy to make people doubt a fact with nothing more than a strong challenge for a source.