[TheDauthi]

> Twitter can't turn off servers and sell off data centers without impacting the product.

A friend of mine tried to tell me that Elon had some type of new computing technology that would let them turn off most of their servers because they could fit all of the tweets in less space.

He blocked me after I told him he had confused Elon Musk with gzip.

[vidarh]

I think your friend gets at why people think Twitters IT costs can be cut though (ignoring his idea about compression): They think Twitters product is mostly the delivery of tweets.

But's not. Twitters product is ad inventory and their ad placement platform, and the engine driving engagement that boosts their ad inventory by reordering the timeline to keep people scrolling. Those are the hard parts.

"Just" delivering and storing tweets is easy. If you ignore the nasty business of the moderation. And most people have never even visited analytics.twitter.com and seen how much data is available to them about their own tweets, much less looked at ads.twitter.com and seen how precisely they can be targeted, and the precision Twitter offers in what kind of things you can pay for (engagement, follows, media views, clicks). And they've certainly not tried running ad campaigns in those categories, and seen how good Twitter are at showing your ads mostly to people doing what you're paying for.

Musk's actions makes me wonder how well he understood the complexity of Twitter too. Surely he must have looked at those other aspects of Twitter before he made his bid.