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Comment by aetimmes | Hacker News Reader

It's directly tied to the $1B/yr in additional interest payments being incurred by the debt used to finance the acquisition. Twitter pre-Elon was profitable. Twitter post-Elon is bleeding cash.

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>Twitter pre-Elon was profitable.

That is not exactly accurate, twitter has lost about a billion dollars since the ipo...

https://www.netcials.com/financial-net-profit-year-quarter-u...

If you look at their reports, they were profitable in 2019 and 2020. 2021 would have been profitable except for a one-time lawsuit payment, and there’s no reason to believe that trend was suddenly going to change.

Twitter returned 30% since the IPO, versus ~200% Nasdaq in the same period. What you're saying is simply not accurate.

There’s a difference between “not as profitable as I’d like” and “unprofitable”. The rest of us are talking about the positive net incomes they reported in recent years and would have reported last year except for that lawsuit payment. Especially here, I would expect someone to be familiar with the way tech companies have often been marginally profitable for years because they were focused on other metrics like growth. Twitter was often subject to unrealistic comparisons with wildly popular companies like Facebook or Google but since they were already doing it it there’s little reason to believe they wouldn’t have been a profitable medium-sized company.

I almost certainly think NASDAQ isn't measuring profits...

Returning more or less than the NASDAQ is an enitrely different issue than profitability.

> Twitter returned 30% since the IPO, versus ~200% Nasdaq in the same period. What you're saying is simply not accurate.

Operating profit and stock share price are two different things.

what about that losing $4mil/day quote? was that false

That number is curiously close to the reported cost of the new debt Musk added.

I don’t have inside information but considering how the acquisition reportedly started deterring ad buys almost as soon as it was announced, it’s very easy to imagine that they were in fact losing money in November but would not have been had the deal never happened.

The $4M/day figure was based on the aforementioned $1B/yr in interest payments.

> It's directly tied to the $1B/yr in additional interest payments being incurred by the debt used to finance the acquisition. Twitter pre-Elon was profitable. Twitter post-Elon is bleeding cash.

I think the loss of advertising revenue since (and because of) the deal is much bigger than the interest expense.

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