Also, interestingly that’s exactly the amount Twitter will need to service the debt they’re saddled with due to the acquisition. Now he just needs to make up the pesky $500M operating deficit and his shiny new toy will break even.
There's definitely ways for them to save money. I heard a rumour some time ago that after Twitter switched to the free/open source Graal JVM JIT compiler it saved them quite a bit of CPU time. Then they did the calculations to see how much they'd save if they licensed Graal Enterprise which is better at optimizing, and it was supposedly well worth it even when taking the licensing costs into account. No lockin, because it's just compiler optimizations.
But, they said no. They decided they'd rather spend more on hardware and pay interns to work on the open source version than pay for a better compiler, because, open source.
That seemed like a very clear and objective example of where they preferred to spend money on increased headcount vs what was maybe the most cost-efficient business decision. I wonder how many more examples like there are lurking in the corners.
Also, interestingly that’s exactly the amount Twitter will need to service the debt they’re saddled with due to the acquisition. Now he just needs to make up the pesky $500M operating deficit and his shiny new toy will break even.