It's not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme requires some element of fraud, yet here you have Twitter's earnings statement and balance sheet right out in the open.

It's not a Ponzi scheme. A Ponzi scheme requires some element of fraud, yet here you have Twitter's earnings statement and balance sheet right out in the open. There are reasonable people who think investing in a company presently running at a loss but with a potential for generating huge profits is a reasonable thing to do. Just poking at your numbers a bit, of that 600M in R&D, 379M was from stock based compensation that hit them in the 4th quarter because of the IPO (they had to expense the RSUs at that point). Don't you think it's a little strange that $400M of the $600M in R&D costs were accrued in the 4th quarter? I'm not advocating buying Twitter stock. Just trying to counter some of the overzealous cynicism in this thread.