Twitter is refusing to pay its Google Cloud bill
platformer.news
platformer.news
Google needs to learn to be proactive instead of quietly reactive on everything. They have no voice in the world, despite the immense power they have. Perhaps that is a strategy.
It all hinges on details of their contract (or lack thereof), and Google has to tread carefully because the black PR of Twitter dragging them around as a result (and you know very well Elon is GREAT at playing the victim) will result in massive losses from other businesses using Google Cloud.
There's a very high profile example of this right now in the US, and I suspect it will demonstrate the difference between silent abuse of power vs overt public abuse of it.
[1] https://edition.cnn.com/2023/05/31/tech/twitter-value-fideli...
He spent $30B on his personal worldwide megaphone. Less than 20% of his savings. That's like a normal rich person buying an expensive house during a real estate bubble.
Also do you realize he paid about 1/4 of the value of Twitter. The rest is loans and other investors burning cash by trusting him and rolling over.
Tell me why did a wealthy man who merely spent "20% of his savings" take on high-interest debts worth over 13 billion?
(speaking as a business owner previously who has had to fire customers)
If you or me don't pay our bills, I fully expect the service to be terminated in 30 days... probably less than that in fact.
Shitter shouldn't get the same treatment as a big, well-known client (although given the quality of Google's support, I wouldn't be surprised if they do, thanks to runaway automation that can't be tamed even for big clients they very much want to give leeway to)
Shitter is in fact banking on that as part of renegotiations.
I find it completely fair if they did get the same treatment as everyone else.
They will cut you off when the time comes, but it can sometimes be surprisingly long. And they will put a lien against the property, too.
In my case it was their fault. I configured automatic payments and they migrated their online system and subsequently dropped my data for payments. Still, they were ruthless about it.
What I've usually seen is they threaten to shut you off with very strong wording, and then continue to threaten you for 3-6 months before they bother to send someone out.
This was a common occurrence that people referred to as 'brown billing' because the shutoff notice had a brown header instead of the green header on your regular utility bill.
Not paying, is unprofessional, and is a poor way to treat your vendors or maintain a relationship with them.
It's absolutely not. The entire economy would break down if every company was constantly "renegotiating", i.e., refusing to pay their bills.
People like Musk and Trump who make a habit of this behavior are not normal. Please let's not try to normalize it.
These are not the same thing as simply refusing to pay your bills.
"Net 90" is not "Net Whenever/Never".
Also the terms should be an agreement, but in practice it's: the large company has more power and will tell you their finance dept will not pay out before X - doesn't matter what you put on the invoice.
I've even been on the other side of that, expensing it because that was easier in our system than getting a PO.
If the story here was just "Twitter is late paying its Google Cloud bill, and Google is giving Twitter additional time to pay in full", then that wouldn't even be much of a story.
Based on what I've heard anecdotally from e.g. freelancers providing services to large corporations, that ship has unfortunately long sailed.
There seems to be a huge spectrum, with "email an invoice payment instructions to the right department and you'll be paid, whoever you are and regardless of whether you provided any service" on one end, and "consider yourself lucky if you saw a cent at the agreed-upon time without having to resort to small claims court" on the other.
Obviously, it's much harder to pull off the latter when the payee is a huge corporation themselves and/or has leverage in terms of being able to cease providing ongoing services.
You're missing the point, just like the other commenter, as explained here: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=36280868
A bureaucratic company failing to pay a freelancer on time is not the same thing as this deliberate, top-down (i.e, Musk-designed) strategy of Twitter refusing to pay its bills.
Google Cloud has a lot of big customers. How many of them do you think are doing this?
Now doing this with existential services you buy from providers that might actually take action and losing you isn't big thing is however not something anyone does.
I had one customer who (top professional auto race team builder) who made a practice of paying as soon as possible. I once got a check in the mail so fast i couldn't figure out how they turned it around that fast (exact amt of invoice, not tge estimate). Guess who always got absolutely prompt attention to their requests & requirements?
Non-payment is just a move for selfish a*holes, which Musk is turning out to be (& yes, I've defended him here before).
They are also not paying their rent on some London office space.
In this instance they're being sued by their landlords, the UK Crown Estates (King Charles, sort of, though not exactly).
What’s the term, “nothingburger”?
I get the sense that this reporting is trying to lean heavily on the usual implications of “refusing to pay the bill”, which is that one can’t pay the bill. But that implication obviously isn’t at play here; Google Cloud isn’t worried that Twitter is broke.
In all likelihood what’s actually happening is that Google Cloud strongly expects the new contract to be less profitable for them, and thus they wish to delay and drag out re-negotiations so they can have the more profitable contract for longer. Refusal to pay invites a lawsuit; if the cost of the lawsuit exceeds the profit that would be gained by holding onto the old contract for longer, it makes more sense to re-negotiate now. I predict Google Cloud will launch a token lawsuit for non-payment and come to the negotiation table at the same time, and when new terms are agreed on Twitter will settle the lawsuit by paying the old contract rates up to the date of the new contract.
For clarity’s sake, I completely agree that it’s a moral imperative to pay your bills on time and in full; what I’m saying here is that I’m not sure that moral imperatives are even the right framework for looking at these interactions between large companies (eg people have morality and ethics, companies have regulations and lawsuits).
If your mechanic still had possession of your car, I guess it would be a similarly leveraged situation.
Corporations are people, my friend. Any immorality committed by them is due to the immorality of their owners and executives.
It's easily possible to be an ethical businessperson; one just has to want to be ethical.
The billion dollar company can take the other billion dollar company and procure the money owed + damages.
If it's worth enough for Google, Google could definitely bring full force of judgments. The only thing is the LBO debtors have a UCC lien which may be worth more than what Twitter is worth in a bankruptcy.
Twitter does currently have cash and may pay a judgment to prevent an event of default on the big debt. But debtors always have to worry being behind secured debt.
But also no one is required to provide services for a deadbeat with no future payment prospects.
The easiest mechanism is definitely just refraining from providing more services. But when debts get to two commas, the legal fees will start to be worth it for collection.
We don’t know what’s true right now anyway
Twitter is broke. "The company" spends more than it collects in revenue, and it has massive debts - the interest on which alone is greater than the revenue it collects. Sure it can borrow more money, from its shareholders if it has to, but even that tap can dry up.
Twitter owes ~$12B from when it was acquired by Elon. Somehow twitter owes this, not Elon. How is that a thing? Twitter put itself ruinously in debt in order to hand over control to someone else.
It's in Google's best interest to maintain continued service for GCP customers since any disruption makes both the customer and Google look bad, regardless of who is at fault. Google likely cares very much about Twitter's users, while Twitter might care more about what services they can lose, potentially at the expense of their users.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=18886804
Here's another case where Google kept charging for a service they failed to deliver and refused to refund that stolen money:
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19956090
Both cause harm to people's livelihoods, but they went on anyways. It's very different from the attitude they're showing towards Twitter.
The second case sounds like an intention to discontinue service, and seem to be a different failure mode not quite related to the current article.
BTW in the first case, Google looks bad because they are. Payment issues are common, and should never ever result in people losing their digital livelihoods. Bans should have a meaningful appeal process. Users should be able to reach human employees that has the power to actually resolve issues. There's no excuse for getting so many basic things wrong here given the consequences.
Your framing of the second case is plainly wrong too. It's theft by Google. You can't discontinue a service you never received. The author moved to prevent further theft only after Google explicitly refused to do what was right.
It's ok to post stories from sites with paywalls that have workarounds. In comments, it's ok to ask how to read an article and to help other users do so.
I tried both 12ft.io and archive.is to read this article, but neither seemed to work. Has anyone managed to bypass the paywall here and can share what worked for them?
His theory is that this may have something to do with higher interest rates. Customers delay large bills for as long as they can.