Musk orders Twitter to cut infrastructure costs by $1B

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

#121

Post by afavour » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 1:42 PM 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.

Then that’s a sign Musk has absolutely lost it. Writing off tens of billions for petty revenge is insane.

(also the shareholders just cashed out, they don’t care)

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

#122

Post by credit_guy » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

fakedang wrote: post #119

credit_guy wrote: post #115

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

This was an all-cash buyout. It does not mean it was not leveraged.

All-cash buyouts are those buyouts where the acquirer pays with cash and not their own stock. In this case, Musk used only cash.

But some of that cash (about $12.7 BN) was borrowed from banks. So, it was leveraged.

In principle some buyer like Musk could buy without any help from banks, but why would they do that? You don't get to be a multi-billionaire without getting familiar with financing.

In any case, leveraged or not, Musk did not saddle Twitter with any debt. Maybe he will do it in the future, but for the time being he didn't, because he did not have time to do it.

He could try to issue a huge amount of debt later, and pay himself an extremely fat dividend, so he can turn a quick profit. But in the current market environment, that does not seem even remotely likely. Who is going to buy newly issued Twitter bonds? At what yields? A one year US Treasury yields 4.8%, what type of yield would one require for a bond issued by Twitter? 10%? 15%? If investors get a hint that Musk is just trying to run Twitter into the ground and get himself a nice exit, they won't invest even at 30%. After the whole saga with Musk repeatedly changing his mind on the deal (and before that the $420-for-sure Tesla buyout), how many investors do you think would fall for a get-rich-quick scheme perpetrated by a guy who can't actually climb the richest man ladder anymore?

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

#123

Post by danielrpa » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 2:00 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #102

partiallypro wrote: post #49

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 wer…

Yep, same here; as a (well paid) hobby, I help smaller companies lower their software bills. When they use 'cloud hosting' instead of a vps or something, that's usually the first point where I can cut 80%+. It is crazy how many things are running there that are not used or needed in almost every company I see. Usually there are software issues (most commonly, no, not enough or plainly wrong db indexes being the #1 to…

Same here, 70% cut in costs. If efficiency isn't a goal and there isn't a strong push for controlling costs, they just keep going up.

I don't know if 1B is a reasonable goal, but Twitter's previous leadership was so incompetent that I wouldn't be surprised. Maybe even more is possible.

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

#124

Post by tenpies » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 2:10 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #120

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…

The analogy you're using is binary (seat belt on or off), whereas an infrastructure cut is more like reducing your thermostat by a couple of degrees, then concluding that no one froze to death, therefore it was an acceptable cut. Many parts of Europe will be running this experiment, in fact.

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

#125

Post by tinus_hn » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 2:26 PM UTC

tluyben2 wrote: post #110

Thorrez wrote: post #109

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I assume tluyben2 means that if the db's index is bad the query has to do a much more expensive scan of the database. By adding correct indices this can be fixed.

That is indeed what I meant; with very little effort and not having much knowledge about database internals, you can save a ton of money. It won’t be perfect that way, but goes a long way vs no indices at all. So that’s why ‘no reason’. Aka very low hanging fruit. Sorry for not being clear and thanks for explaining.

No to mention adding an index is practically without risk, the outcome of queries is the same except probably faster.

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

#126

Post by fragmede » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:26 PM UTC

tenpies wrote: post #124

UncleMeat wrote: post #120

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

The analogy you're using is binary (seat belt on or off), whereas an infrastructure cut is more like reducing your thermostat by a couple of degrees, then concluding that no one froze to death, therefore it was an acceptable cut. Many parts of Europe will be running this experiment, in fact.

more like, cutting off heating to the building, telling everyone to wear sweaters, and just wait and see if anyone has a serious medical emergency.

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

#127

Post by indigodaddy » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:37 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.

Having their own DCs means they are on-prem already.

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

#128

Post by indigodaddy » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:38 PM UTC

devoutsalsa wrote: post #81

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…

> Storage is cheap Seriously. They could back up all of Twitter on Backblaze for $7/month.

Hah, I chuckled bigly, nice one.

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

#129

Post by 7e » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:46 PM UTC

Musk failed to deliver the $35K Model 3 and Starlink prices are rising. I doubt there is a billion dollars left lying on the table, at least not accessible to a man of Musk’s nature.

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

#130

Post by kevinventullo » Sat, Nov 05, 2022, 3:48 PM UTC

UncleMeat wrote: post #120

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…

Except Twitter going down is not as serious as death. The answer to “How much $ is it worth to get an extra 9 of reliability?” is never “Infinite”. So, I agree with OP, if they can save a big chunk of their opex with a negligible decrease in reliability (measured by something like, how much user churn are we seeing as a result of the downtime), then it’s a good call.

I don’t know enough about Twitter’s internals to guess whether this is a good call. A bit off-topic, but having worked at Meta I think it would probably not be a good call there. Infra engineers are already directly incentivized to find fractional-percentage wins, because the savings to the company are often greater than their total comp, and that’s a pretty straightforward way to justify a high performance rating.