[beebmam]

The truth about the Twitter layoffs is that the company is not even remotely profitable and likely never will be, so it doesn't really matter that much as long as the company barely continues to operate. You can certainly barely operate a web services company with a barebones crew: we all do it every year during the holidays! But long term growth? Yeah, good luck with that.

Twitter is now just nice yacht for a billionaire. The acquisition was no different than Ron Watkins buying 8chan.

[sidfthec]

Twitter lost 200mil on 5b in revenue in 2021 and has had a handful of profitable quarters in recent history. Not sure why you think it's "not even remotely profitable and likely never will be".

Of course, that's a pre-Elon analysis. Elon's loans alone add 1 bil/year in interest costs, and reports say there's been a large drop in revenue since his purchase.

[908B64B197]

> The truth about the Twitter layoffs is that the company is not even remotely profitable and likely never will be, so it doesn't really matter that much as long as the company barely continues to operate.

But it was profitable at certain times. Despite all the reported "bloat". Ironically now, it has little hopes of being profitable thanks to advertisers pulling out due to lax moderation (some of the automated stuff no longer working because the maintainers are gone!). So even if they managed to run the site with a skeleton crew, assuming they keep breaking non-essential features, it's unclear they could ever become profitable again.

There seems to be this echo chamber around the Twitter acquisition that thinks most software companies are bloated and that software engineers basically do nothing. They seem to believe Twitter will make that demonstration. It's particularly pervasive in semi or non-technical circles. I guess it's the same crowd that bought into no-code and low-code tools to "get rid of expensive developers" for the last decade.

While Twitter hasn't suffered any complete outage as of yet, several products and features seem to be broken, as well as a good chunk of their API (I don't buy the claim it's intentional because the latencies and error rates have been jumping up). To be completely honest, this level of service degradation would have killed more serious products. It's fine for Twitter because there's no SLA, no enterprise customers and no critical infra running on it.

[GVIrish]

Twitter actually had some profitable years lately and in the last 5 years before Musk bought it they recorded a net profit. Revenue had been grown 60% over that time.

But now with Twitter reportedly losing 40% of its advertisers and taking on $1 billion of annual debt servicing costs, it seems unlikely they'll be able to get back to profitable if things keep going this way.

[spicybright]

That's actually a good point. I bet it helps as a marking tool for his future investments too.

"He owns twitter, of course he knows what he's doing!"

"He owns a Lambo, of course he knows what he's doing!"