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Comment by drcongo | Hacker News Reader

The fact that they're being sued by the landlord of their offices because they can't pay the rent seems like a good indicator.

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Not just physical rents. The Information reports that Twitter is at least $70 million behind on their AWS bills:

https://www.theinformation.com/articles/musk-delayed-paying-...

Amazon is retaliating by not paying their Twitter ad bills, which seems like the kind of thing that can be effective against the Trump-Musk school of business operations.

Couldn't they just retaliate by stopping their AWS service? Isn't that what happens when you don't pay your bill?

That's kind of like the trope of a loan shark "busting people's legs". It doesn't do any good, because then they can't work to make the money they need to pay off the loan shark.

Threats only work if you carry them out when someone calls your bluff. The loan shark is interested in making sure everyone else pays.

just revoke their account and wipe their databases :-) like every other account that's behind on their bills

There is a 5-year contract in place, so a little different than just a credit card on file that is failing to charge based on usage. Also, it was reported they aren’t using the compute power as expected in contract, so the bill may not fully relate to actual resources consumed.

That's insane. Why isn't amazon just pulling the plug? I imagine that with 40% staff, twitter now lacks the institutional knowledge to switch providers. Seems like amazon cutting them off would be a really effective way for amazon to make sure that they get paid first.

> Seems like amazon cutting them off would be a really effective way for amazon to make sure that they get paid first.

Or an effective way of killing Twitter, losing their money and a customer forever.

Amazon can afford to play a patient game of tit-for-tat.

I don't think so. An hour of downtime isn't going to kill twitter (One assumes that twitter has it together enough to pay ASAP once site goes down), and once you do it once to prove you're serious you probably never have to do it again and will get paid on time forever after.

> One assumes that twitter has it together enough to pay ASAP once site goes down

I don't assume that. ;-)

I would imagine AWS desperately wants to avoid a reputation as someone who will shut down a x billion dollar business over an unpaid bill. They will try every reasonable remedy to recover the money before taking the nuclear option.

Do you really believe this report?

"Twitter sales and marketing staff were told by their colleagues that Amazon had threatened to withhold payment for advertising it runs on Twitter". My experience with sales and marketing staff at virtually every company I've ever worked is that they are morons.

I simply don't believe that AWS would allow this to continue without shutting them down. There's no way a contract allows for them to rack up bills like this.

The comment you're replying to features the "Trump-Musk" line, which is strongly indicative of an incredibly biased person whose allowed politics to hijack their brain. Comparing Musk to Trump is just absurd.

if they went from >7000 to <2000 he might be trying to hardball renegotiate or terminate overpriced contracts to house that no longer existent army of workers that were probably put in place even before covid. Who knows since they are private, but that's what we're currently facing in SF ourselves - an empty office with a multiyear lease that nobody knows what the f to do with.

Sure he's trying to hardball, but he's also doing that with his Amazon bills, which can hardly be seen as a good sign.

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