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Comment by recuter | Hacker News Reader

Economist opening line: "Elon musk’s two months running Twitter has been an unhappy experiment".

Latest publicly available usage report from twitter (as you all remember widely and frantically predicted to crash and disappear from the internet):

  Conversation impressions surpassed all previous quadrennial events.

  There were a whopping 147B impressions of the #WC2022 conversation globally, easily surpassing #WC2018 and more than doubling the number of impressions of the #Tokyo2020 Olympics. 
  
  Whether the crowd was reacting to a big goal, watching highlights, predicting the outcome of the next match, or celebrating the star players, fans came to Twitter to discuss all aspects of the game. 

  "24,400 tweets per second for France’s goal, highest ever for World Cup!"

-- https://blog.twitter.com/en_us/topics/events/2022/2022-World...

Edit: Brave down voters, use your words ;)

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The numbers that really matter, though, are given later in the opening paragraph:

> Twitter, which lost $221m in 2021, is now on track to lose $4bn a year, by one estimate.

The challenge is turning those new engagement statistics into dollars.

Those "new engagements" are gone already .. they were the watering hole chatter of the World Cup, and they happened on Twitter as Twitter hasn't yet cratered.

The question of interest here is what will be the global water cooler come the next World Cup?

Twitter. I'd bet on that. I imagine that someone else will be running the show, and it will possibly still be owned by Elon Musk, but it 100% will still be Twitter.

There is no real replacement. It's not gonna be some alternative that calls retweets "retruths", nor will it be a decentralised alternative, no matter how much we want it to be, the UX is simply not there (yet?). Even if an alternative pops up, it will take more than 4 years for it to dethrone Twitter.

Put your faith in inertia. It is a powerful (lack of) force.

Idk. In the last week, half the infosec blogs i followed stopped posting on twitter (or writing about stuff they saw on twitter) so at least for me, i only went on twitter thrice last week? compared to probably an average of ten times a week in the last two month.

I'm not even actively boycotting (i don't believe in boycott, it's just a nice story to make you believe you have power)

They have a run rate > 4 billion a year even after all those layoffs? What will it look like after they are done paying out severance packages?

> They have a run rate > 4 billion a year even after all those layoffs?

I highly recommend reading the following article:

https://www.npr.org/2022/11/30/1139964806/how-elon-bought-tw...

Elon Musk bought Twitter with "loans". The interest of those loans are now a responsibility for Twitter. Meaning did NOT have a huge run rate. The leveraged buyout caused this.

There have been an insane amount of focus that the huge predicted losses are a result of lazy overpaid developers. This while ignoring that Elon Mush did a leveraged buyout. The number of employees wasn't the issue, making Twitter responsible for billions in loans while the interest rate of those loans went up is the problem.

Elon Musk keeps complaining about the federal reserve and the interest rate. He's complaining for a reason. He gambled and couldn't back out.

> spent $13 billion of borrowed money on the acquisition.

Assuming Twitter is breaks even otherwise (give or take a few hundred million) for it to hit 4 billion wouldn't that be like 30% interest? Not impossible, but that seems really high to me.

This has his unsecured loans at something like 11%[0] that seems more reasonable and would have the loans costing around one and half billion.

[0]https://www.reuters.com/business/musks-bankers-mull-new-tesl...

It's because the revenue fell heavily (first the uncertainty concerning the buyout, then Elon himself and his attacks on brands didn't help). I've read the interests would cost him a billion, and twitter lost revenue is like twice that.

4 billions seems a bit excessive, but 2.5-3 wouldn't surprise me.

To have 4 billion in losses don't you have to have 4 billion in costs? If loans are a billion that means Twitters overhead even after laying off 75% of the staff and cutting free lunches etc is over 3 billion. What makes me question that is you can build a football stadium every six months for that money or an aircraft carrier every 18 months, and those aren't examples of particularly efficiently ran projects. That seems like a lot for what they do.

I could see perhaps a 2.5-3 billion loss with severence payments, lawsuits and the media uproar next year but that will pass eventually. The real question is what things look like once that dies down. I don't think he will make his money back but historically when captains of industry for lack of a better term buy media outlets that rarely happens anyway (Did Bezos make money on the Washington Post, they are taking about layoffs right now). 4 billion just has the little accountant in my head going "wait a minute".

I get it, i understand the 4B figure (and i was very wrong with my 2.5B figure)! I'ts because the advertisment revenue is down 90%. 90% of 4.5B is roughly 4B, hence TFA number i guess.

Now, it's only down that much since november, but it was still down 50% in october (due to the buyout and uncertainties, not Elon's policies), and it was already under last year results this summer. You see the issue? TFA (and me in believing without understanding) fucked up the calculations.

So. Let's not be charitable, and take the worst case scenario:

- Debt service: 1B,

- Cost reduction: Mostly inexistant due to severance package,

- Revenue reduction: 350*2(november-december) + 200 (october) + 200 (rest of the year): 1.1B

Total hole: 2.1B (worst case)

A charitable napkin calculation would be .5B.

I personally think twitter is loosing more than just the debt servicing, because some payments are very late, and it seems that severance package are hard to get for ex-employees. I don't think he would have done the policy change, or have tweeted what he has tweeted either if it was just money (i'm being very charitable here, as an excuse to Elon fans for being a bit of an ass in prior comments)

Looking at their past 10-k, cost of revenue is ~$1.8B which includes infra costs. As these are self hosted, infra costs are largely going to be fixed; with a smaller component scaling with usage (things like electricity and maintenance).

Usage going up, and taking a 50% haircut on revenue would make quite the dent in cash flows.

Think I found the guy who this 4 billion dollar estimate is from: https://www.tipranks.com/experts/analysts/daniel-ives

Doesn't have a great track record.

That's leveraged buyouts for you.

On the other hand, advertisers have been turning away (at least for some time) and Twitter now has to pay a lot of interest. It will really be interesting to see how this turns out.

The internet is still growing :-)

For a while, the fact that Major Event in YEAR + 4 has more views than Major Event in YEAR is not impressive on its own.

For all we know Twitter could be sitting still and be carried away by the current.

The trick question is: how are their financials, and especially what's their growth rate compared to their competitors? (Google, Facebook/WhatsApp/Instagram, TikTok, Snapchat, Telegram etc).

It's notable that there haven't been technical difficulties as a result of the world cup traffic. The worst I've seen reported is that 2FA codes on certain mobile carriers no longer work.

But Twitter can't claim its policies on content have been a success because the World Cup was popular, the two are unrelated.

Since we can now concede that no notable technical difficulties have occurred (despite predictions) and the World Cup was the most popular heretofore (despite predictions) nobody can reasonably claim that twitter policies about staffing, content, or otherwise have as of yet materially hampered anything other than the moods of the doomsayers.

Aforementioned doomsayers, here, and in the press like the posted opinion piece, are really the only ones making substantial claims. And when those prognostications don't manifest they seem to seethe and double down. Curios behavior.

I down vote anyone that whines about down voting. It’s worthless and makes the comment worthless and deserving of no respect. Zero tolerance.

You whined about down votes. Your comment is worthless and deserves no respect. That I’m telling you this is more than it deserves.

There, used my words

I actually welcome these particular downvotes. Not whining about anything, I simply would like people to additionally use their words (if they are capable of doing so).

No. Any comment or series of comments that includes whining about down votes (which is what you did) deserves down votes and deserves little to no additional explanation. I include my own comment in this. I debated even writing it.

Maybe you should try to use your adult voice and try and engage people in a way that they would want to have a worthwhile conversation.

Instead, your attitude is pretty insulting at best.

You want people to engage in civil conversation? Check yourself first.

Under normal circumstances I would agree with this sentiment but in this instance we will have to agree to disagree.

It is of course your right to feel insulted but I will simply point out that my post had no content other than directly relevant quotes from the posted article and the twitter blog.

Least I risk sounding as if I am speaking to toddlers, quoting does not even necessarily imply agreement. Relevant information, however many conniptions it might trigger, is still relevant information.

Hence, downvotes are fine, brigading is not. Be well. :)

Since Elon bought twitter, you can't say anything even mildly positive about him or his companies now without immediate downvotes.

Strangely enough, I have not actually said anything positive about him or his companies.

> Latest publicly available usage report from twitter

My mum says I am super smart.

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