As you may know I am fascinated by large numbers and the difficulty of perceiving their magnitude. Nobody can deny that the purchase of twitter by Elon Mask is a big number!
What is the estimated value of Elon Mask's fortune? 210 billion dollars as of October 27, 2022 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elon_Musk) How much has Elon Mask paid for Twitter?: 44 billion dollars. (https://news.sky.com/story/elon-musk-completes-44bn-twitter-takeover-according-to-us-media-reports-12723010). This is supposed to be the 20% of Elon fortune. That's a lot! As a comparison so far, NASA has spent more than 48 billion dollars to develop the Space Launch System, Orion spacecraft, and prepare ground systems at the Kennedy Space Center for the new-generation moon program (https://spaceflightnow.com/2022/11/16/nasa-triumphs-in-successful-debut-launch-of-huge-sls-moon-rocket/). My question is, why is Twitter so worthy?
Possibility A: The infrastructure
It seems that in 2010 twitter decided to build its infrastructure and stop depending on third parties (https://blog.twitter.com/engineering/en_us/topics/infrastructure/2017/the-infrastructure-behind-twitter-scale). According to this same article "Hadoop: We have multiple clusters storing over 500 PB divided in four groups (real time, processing, data warehouse and cold storage). Our biggest cluster is over 10k nodes. We run 150k applications and launch 130M containers per day." Now, let's imagine they have 100 clusters of 10k nodes. That would be 1 million computers. If they were PCs they would be worth around 400EUR per unit (they don't have a screen or keyboard or anything but a CPU): 0.5 billion dollars. Even if I'm wrong by a factor of 10 (5 billion dollars) I'm still far from what he paid. It wouldn't seem to be that.
Possibility B: The worker force
Maybe it's the people who work there? 8000 people (according to https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TWTR/twitter/number-of-employees). That would be 44/8000=0.005= 5 million for each employee. As good as they are, it seems impossible for their value to be so high.
Possibility C: Twitter users (the famous "community"):
How many people use Twitter?: 0.48 billion people (according to: https://datareportal.com/essential-twitter-stats). It seems reasonable in proportion to the people in the world (8 billion people). They could hardly be too many more. Lets do the math: Each Twitter user has cost of 44/0.48=92 dollars. Does each Twitter user really generate that much value? I would really like to see this in the citizen science projects I'm involved. Maybe it is if we read this other article (https://news.sky.com/story/largest-us-automaker-temporarily-halts-paid-advertising-on-twitter-after-elon-musks-takeover-12732862 ): "Ad sales made up more than 90% of Twitter's revenue in the second quarter." Without an audience, advertising would not work.
In summary, that I can not understand this operation but I have one thing clear: I do not like to be sold for 90 dollars and therefore I have decided to put my personal Twitter account on hold and redirect my time to more productive activities instead co creating content for others to get rich.
As in love films: Sorry, I believe I need some time.
"The bird is freed"
