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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

#141

Post by koyanisqatsi »

indigodaddy wrote: post #133
koyanisqatsi wrote: post #77

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm pretty certain that Twitter's code is essentially append-only. It's possible to add new features and keep the old stuff running but there is no way to re-architect it to reduce costs. They are already compressing the data so there is no improvement to be gained there. As for cold storage, re-engineering backups and other forms of redundancy will reduce long-term costs but it won't reduce their yearly operating re…

AGI would be Artificial general intelligence?

Yes.

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

#142

Post by Balgair »

metadat wrote: post #139
Balgair wrote: post #136

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's been a fun 'arms race' of sorts between hard-drive manufacturers and FAANG-esque coders. I have a friend that works for a very big hard-drive company. So, think very large data storage at scale. Well, they discovered that a fair bit of their spin-disk machines would get to the max rotation lifetimes with little reader-head arm movement. AKA, they were just run for months at a time without ever being really used.…

This is fascinating, and deserves its own article. People do the darndest things.

If I can get my buddy to write one, I'll make sure to post it to HN. Thanks for the idea, it may be enough to get him to write something up.

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

#143

Post by hackeraccount »

GoOnThenDoTell wrote: post #57
partiallypro wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

They'd be easily found out by a smart engineer and promptly fired and probably banned by every competitor once word got out.

Incompetence and mistakes are usually hard to prove is malice

There's proof and then there's the recommendation that you ask for when trying to find your next job.

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

#144

Post by hackeraccount »

I'm not convinced this is bad for Twitter - if they reduce their scope with it.

They should open the API back up and let third party developers step in and start doing all the stuff - filtering for example - that they don't do a good job at.

Just be a login and a platform.

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

#145

Post by humanizersequel »

trowawee wrote: post #134
credit_guy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-billiona…

You do not seem to know what you're talking about. The 12.7bn that was borrowed is going on Twitter's books. Their debt load prior to this leveraged buyout was 5.5bn; it's now 18.3bn[0], with yearly interest payments of roughly 1bn. [0]: https://www.barrons.com/articles/tesla-stock-twitter-debt-51...

>yearly interest payments of roughly 1bn

This is on top of the principal? They pay 1bn every year and none of it counted against their debt?

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

#147

Post by tinus_hn »

adamckay wrote: post #137
tinus_hn wrote: post #125

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Not true. An index isn't free so you can impact the write performance, depending on the workload and usecases slower writes could have more of an impact than faster reads. But even in a read heavy application it's possible that your databases query planner is "tricked" into using a specific index which can actually be slower than another (or even none) so you should always measure the impact that adding an index can…

Yes it could be slower, but it’s very unlikely to actually break the application.

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

#148

Post by spoils19 »

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…

> This is sort of where Facebook/Meta got it right, IMHO - run infrastructure on-prem, at scale, in a super-efficient "everything fails" sort of way.

It's fairly ignorant to make this claim without realizing that Twitter also runs the majority of their stuff on-prem as well.

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

#149

Post by afavour »

credit_guy wrote: post #122
fakedang wrote: post #119

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-billiona…

You may need to change your username. The debt is assumed by Twitter and it is liable for $1bn a year in interest payments:

https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...

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

#150

Post by credit_guy »

afavour wrote: post #149
credit_guy wrote: post #122

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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-billiona…

You may need to change your username. The debt is assumed by Twitter and it is liable for $1bn a year in interest payments: https://www.nytimes.com/2022/10/30/technology/elon-musk-twit...

Haha, I'll give that serious consideration.

Now, I read that NY Times article, and I guess the crucial sentence that you are referring to is

  To do the deal, Mr. Musk, the world’s richest man, loaded about $13 billion in debt on the company, which had not turned a profit for eight of the past 10 years.
Now, I'm not privy to the deal's details, but since you appear to be more informed, maybe you can clarify something for me.

How could Musk load with debt a company that he did not own yet? Legally, how does this work? In the end someone has to sign a piece of paper. Can I sign a piece of paper making you owe some money to someone else?

I can see how this could work. The then shareholders decided (indirectly via the board of directors) to borrow the cool $12.7 BN so Musk can use his own money and that debt to buy them all out at twice the fair market price. But then was it Musk who loaded Twitter with debt, or the outgoing directors?

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