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Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

reuters.com

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Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#41

Post by rippercushions »

frellus wrote: post #20

To be fair, there are going to be plenty of critical leaks coming out of Twitter with a 50% cutting of staff. That's so many whistleblowers, my backyard is completely leaf free now. Frankly, if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid. To be fair, I don't know if Twitter is overspending on infrastructure, but I would guess there are always places to streaml…

AFAIK Twitter's serving infra is mostly on-prem and they use cloud mostly for analytics.

https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastruc... (2017 tho)

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#42

Post by tjr225 »

I dislike Elon Musk as much as the next guy but why are people upset about Twitter burning to the ground? It’s just another paint brush used to paint the downfall of our society. Good riddance. I hope Elon goes under with them.

This is a platform built on driving clicks and driving clicks on fear and anger. More fear = more clicks = more ad revenue = negative feedback loop. Just like the New York Times. Just like NPR. Just like Fox News. Just like Reddit. Just another piece of shit we should all enjoy watching burn into the ground.

Spend some time with your family. We will all be incredibly lucky if this ad-tech insanity falls apart.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#43

Post by nothatscool »

nemothekid wrote: post #23
refurb wrote: post #11

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why a waste? Sounds like a smart move? Buy a company, drastically reduce unnecessary expenses.

> Buy a company, drastically reduce unnecessary expenses. This famously works out very well for PE firms. It seems very naive to assume Twitter was casually spending 1B/yr in "unnecessary expenses". Maybe the previous CEO/CTO was a baffling moron, but I tend to have more faith in people absent of evidence otherwise. I'm going to be surprised if Twitter is around in year - I'm just they have the capital to keep the li…

Weren’t they spending almost half a billion a year on r&d?

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#45

Post by seibelj »

SicSemperUranus wrote: post #38
seibelj wrote: post #21

Everyone on the internet knows how to run Twitter better than the richest man on earth who revolutionized both the electric car and private space industries. I wish I could invest in Twitter now but I’ll wait for the cryptocurrency launch.

Your sarcastic implication being that being good at managing car and space companies make him good at managing a social media company? Not only that, good enough to be better at it than his predecessor? Not only that , he's better at it within days of arriving? Occam's razor says he's a big impulsive dummy.

Oh wow running a social media company is just soooo hard how can he possibly figure it out? It must require some super human level of insight /s

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#47

Post by Hydraulix989 »

koyanisqatsi wrote: post #13

Elon used to be a software engineer so it's kinda weird how he thinks a legacy codebase like Twitter can be fixed up to use $1B less every year. Twitter is limited mainly by storage, their compute costs are negligible in comparison. So unless there is so much bloat in their hardware procurement process that they're over-provisioning storage by more than $1B a year there is no way to reduce costs. The hardware costs w…

I struggle to find one correct remark in your comment. This take clearly suggests you have never worked on any similar infrastructure / distributed systems before at scale.

So you're telling me there's no backend or compute workers? And you're telling me that there are no opportunities for performance optimization? That they are already 100% native C++ services at full parallel utilization? That they've already tuned the size and cost of their ML models? That their model evaluation infra is fully saturated?

Storage is cheap. I believe they are on AWS, so hardware costs are already taken out of the equation. If so, even just moving to on-prem would save them the $1B easily.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#48

Post by seibelj »

bagels wrote: post #29
seibelj wrote: post #21

Everyone on the internet knows how to run Twitter better than the richest man on earth who revolutionized both the electric car and private space industries. I wish I could invest in Twitter now but I’ll wait for the cryptocurrency launch.

Is there some kind of scam coin associated with the twitter deal?

I am assuming twitcoin is coming and I will buy in

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#49

Post by partiallypro »

frellus wrote: post #20

To be fair, there are going to be plenty of critical leaks coming out of Twitter with a 50% cutting of staff. That's so many whistleblowers, my backyard is completely leaf free now. Frankly, if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid. To be fair, I don't know if Twitter is overspending on infrastructure, but I would guess there are always places to streaml…

I had a friend that worked for a massive company in the Valley which I'll leave unnamed, that told me about them just leaving servers running hot with no throughput for months at a time. So, I guess it's possible. I doubt his estimate was pulled out of a hat (but I could be wrong, or the article could just be pulling that out of a hat/using an unreliable source.)

I've taken over AWS and Azure accounts before that were paying tens of thousands for unattached disks, load balancers, big servers that were doing very little that could have just been on a burstable VM. Massive messes that in some cases took months to clean up. So, I can believe there could be a massive bit of cost savings available if it were poorly managed. I've never seen the scale of a company like Twitter, but I really doubt there isn't some dead weight. I know storage is a massive cost, and he has stated he was going to purge accounts that were unused over a certain time frame.

Re: Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B – sources

#50

Post by dkjaudyeqooe »

bagels wrote: post #37
dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #28

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If they can, that's great, if not then they're setting up Twitter for bankruptcy, or asset sales, if they have any. Generally speaking, loading up a company with debt is corrosive to good management. If you have to cover your interest payments each month, and that's hard, it focuses the business on short term survival rather than investing in growth in the longer term.

Definitely, the debt is a burden. I don't see how it's a waste to save money though. Maybe the cuts are so dramatic it damages the business, but reducing wasted money is generally good management.

It's like surgery: making cuts is part of the job, but the more drastic and indiscriminate the more likely the patient dies.

Given that Musk has just arrived, how can these cuts be carefully considered? He burst through the door and started slashing from what anyone can tell.

Even if Twitter is heavily bloated, the cuts may be fatal anyway on that basis.

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