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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

#31

Post by bushbaba »

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 don’t think the 1B/year shows issue on cloud pricing. It’s instead bloat of twitter’s setup. That’s way in excess of what should reasonably be spent. I suspect there’s a lot of bad coding practice going on. Of which the bulk is data analytics.

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

#32

Post by nemo »

fsdjkflsjfsoij wrote: post #9
moistly wrote: post #7

I suppose if everyone is fleeing the service, less infrastructure is required.

That most likely won't happen though. In a month most people won't be talking about this and Twitter will be running fine.

This one looks meaningfully different. I won't be logging on in a month since I've already deleted my account (had it since 2010).

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

#33

Post by 0xy »

rhaway84773 wrote: post #5

The risk for Twitter isn’t that it might go down for some periods of time. The risk is that if it starts going down on a regular basis and/or performance is degraded, a competitor could swoop in and clean their clocks. This might be a good time for Google to start Google+ again as an independent product one needs to sign in and create a new account for.

Twitter was famously unreliable for years with the "fail whale", and no such competitor swooped in despite years of problems. So this argument doesn't seem to hold water.

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

#35

Post by colechristensen »

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…

Everyone is “overspending” on infrastructure. There is always money to save the question comes down to where you want to expend your engineering effort and what risk levels you want to take.

“Make fewer features, focus on spending less” is a valid executive decision, it’s just a matter of priority. Twitter seemingly being feature complete and losing lots of money most years makes doing this now a decent decision.

Spending too much like that is generally a symptom of not paying attention and noticing the waste, it happens from time to time. Gets to feel normal, then you notice and correct.

I’ve been mostly responsible for cloud spend a number of times and had several events of cutting spending by 20% or more over the years.

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

#36

Post by [deleted] »

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…

[deleted]

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

#37

Post by bagels »

dkjaudyeqooe wrote: post #28
bagels wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ignoring all the other things that are wrong with this whole situation... if they can make it $1B more efficient, how is it a waste even given the loans? Presumably the plan is to get rid of the debt eventually, and then you'll have a much more financially healthy company, assuming it can actually get $1B more efficient.

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.

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

#38

Post by SicSemperUranus »

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.

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

#39

Post by valeg »

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?

Doge?

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

#40

Post by colechristensen »

edge17 wrote: post #25

Why does this article claim to know that Twitter might go down due to cost cutting? Isn't there a possibility that their infrastructure is just hugely wasteful? Having never worked at giant web app company, if it were run efficiently then what should we expect their server and infra costs to be? Surely that is the type of Fermi calculation someone on this site can make.

Right? The real cost cutting is usually “hey there’s this huge X sitting around that nobody uses 99% of the time” or “This process is 10000x faster after someone did some performance engineering” or “we’re storing this PB dataset a dozen times for no reason”

There are often lots of ways to cut the fat that have nothing to do with reducing (reliability related) redundancy.

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