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Comment by bardak | Hacker News Reader

If you actually looked at the balance sheet of twitter before Elon took it over it was quite possible to make it profitable. It would have needed to cut cost and probably try and to boost its ad platform a bit more but well within the realm of possibilities.

With the debt that Elon has saddled them with I doubt they will ever be profitable again without declaring bankruptcy.

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> it was quite possible to make it profitable

Without the $760M settlement, they'd have made about $270M in 2021[1].

[1] "2021 operating loss of $493 million, or an operating margin of -10%, includes a one-time litigation-related net charge of $766 million" - https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...

At the absolute pinnacle of ZIRP era, there were just barely able to get into the black (ex their legal settlement). That’s not an extremely healthy business. They were going to crash in 22/23 regardless of ownership.

Crash as in what? Get delisted from the Nasdaq and go bankrupt or just have a bad bearish couple years or something? Their cashflow had pretty consistently improved since their IPO, they would've maybe had a couple bearish years, would've laid off employees like most other tech companies and most likely would have roughly followed the overall Nasdaq trajectory in the market. But that's a normal business cycle, the stock market is full of companies in much worse shape (look at Amazon for its first decade) that can survive any storm as long as their DSCR ratio isn't crazy...like Twitter's is now.

Twitter never had a health P/E (Price/earning) ratio. 270M is great on a 2B company but terrible on a +40B company.

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