On: Back of the Envelope Calculations at Twitter 2.0

[andsoitis]

> Twitter ran ALL its infra for $1.7B in 2021. It made $5B in revenue that years, and was profitable with gross profit margin of 20+%.

I don’t know that it makes sense to say a company is profitable when they make a net loss, regardless of gross profit. In 2021 Twitter made a net loss of over $220 million.

[evanelias → andsoitis]

In 2021, Twitter settled a shareholder lawsuit for $800 million. That's a one-time expense, not an ongoing cost each year.

[andsoitis → evanelias]

Twitter also made a net loss in 2020 to the tune of over $1 billion.

They only managed to report net income in 2018 and 2019.

So looking at the overall picture I still argue that saying Twitter is a profitable business to be very very optimistic and not really true.

[evanelias → andsoitis]

Seems less cut and dry to me:

* Profitable in 2018

* Profitable in 2019

* Would have been profitable in 2021, if not for the shareholder lawsuit

* Profitable in H1 2022, despite having an operating loss, due to making a $655m profit on the sale of MoPub

I'm not saying this is a great business. But some folks are making it sound like Twitter was about to collapse and go broke on its own, which is ridiculous. They still had $2.7B cash + $3.4B short-term investments on hand at the end of Q2!

[zimpenfish → andsoitis]

> In 2021 Twitter made a net loss of over $220 million.

Due to a legal settlement payout of $800M. Without that one-off, they'd have been $580M in profit.