Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B

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

#111

Post by nyargh » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 9:20 AM UTC

darthrupert wrote: post #106

afavour wrote: post #63

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Not really the point here. If you spent tens of billions purchasing Twitter you presumably don’t want the world to be without it. You have a very active interest in making it a success.

Unless you're so beyond caring and vindictive that you're willing to do that just to screw over the shareholders who forced you to buy the company.

Screwing them over how, exactly? As far as I can tell most of the shareholders got cashed out at a valuation way above market. I'd love to be similarly "screwed over" given the opportunity.

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

#112

Post by BrandoElFollito » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 9:41 AM UTC

I work and worked for huge companies in the direct CIO team. Many times I thought "that is wasteful, we should do X".

I self-host a lot at home and am a standard nerd and what I learned over 30 years is that my knowledge does not scale at all.

In such companies even if the DC is idle, knowing what happens when you switch it off does not exist. Even worse, when cutting/moving a service, three blocks down something crumbles and their custodian has no idea why (and worse: they would not even know that something was switched off if there is no strict change management).

It is easier if you are a modern company that uses some modern best practices, there is at least hope that the configuration gives you a clue.

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

#113

Post by listless » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 11:32 AM UTC

factsarelolz wrote: post #22

tfsh wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

All those unnecessary expenses like content moderation and robust fault tolerant infrastructure.

Or gigantic offices in expensive down town areas, all the coworkering space rent, food served at said office buildings, and personnel.

This was my thought. Or at least move HQ somewhere else. Although he’ll probably end up doing that anyway.

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

#114

Post by throwoutway » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 12:08 PM UTC

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…

They barely run anything in the cloud, they’ve been operating their own data centers & infrastructure for over a decade. So they’re doing the same thing as Meta.

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

#115

Post by credit_guy » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 12:32 PM UTC

hither_shores wrote: post #107

colechristensen wrote: post #99

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wait, what debt has Musk made Twitter take on? (being at the helm mere days, I really doubt there's any, debt like that takes longer to raise) Musk himself took on ~$12 billion to finance the deal, that debt isn't on Twitter's books.

It was a leveraged buyout

Ok, so what if it was a leveraged buyout? All buyouts are. How did Twitter get "saddled" with debt?

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

#116

Post by [deleted] » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 12:54 PM UTC

trowawee wrote: post #68

Hydraulix989 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> If so, even just moving to on-prem would save them the $1B easily Except you can't wave a magic wand and shift the entire distributed infrastructure for one of the five most visited sites on earth on-prem. Twitter has two DCs. Running their infra on-prem somewhere would require reworking the entire company from the ground up in a way that would take years and cost substantially more than $1b.

[deleted]

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

#117

Post by reaperducer » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 12:58 PM UTC

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…

if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid.

A then-current Twitter employee told one of the New York Times podcasts that Twitter's infra looks overbuilt because the teams focus primarily on reliability, with new features presumably coming second.

Feels like Twitter is now joining the "move fast and break things" club.

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

#118

Post by akudha » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 1:08 PM UTC

tjr225 wrote: post #42

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…

It doesn’t matter if Twitter burns to the ground. Some other shitty website will take its place.

Instead of raging against shitty media, we should concentrate on creating better media. It is exceptionally hard though. There are independent (relatively) media like TYT. These have their own problems, but at least they’re better than shit like Fox

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

#119

Post by fakedang » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 1:15 PM UTC

credit_guy wrote: post #115

hither_shores wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It was a leveraged buyout

Ok, so what if it was a leveraged buyout? All buyouts are. How did Twitter get "saddled" with debt?

No, all-cash buyouts are also a thing.

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

#120

Post by UncleMeat » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 1:37 PM UTC

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…

> Frankly, if Musk cuts $1B from the run rate and there isn't a bad outage, a lot of people will look pretty stupid.

Is this a good way of reasoning?

If somebody said "frankly, if Bob stops wearing his seatbelt and doesn't die, a lot of people will look pretty stupid" we'd push back. Now the opposite is also not true, where if things go fine Musk is still an idiot. Only the people who know the internals of the system can really say with confidence. One thing I am sure of is that Musk is not one of those people.