saryant

The issue there is running it on k8s. On bare metal or even VMs it’s not at all hard to run even at scale.

You’re off by a couple orders of magnitude on what it takes to run Twitter.

If you don’t see how this strategy is tax inefficient then you have no business doing this.

Because your idea makes no sense, to be frank. The tax inefficiency alone would be absurd.

The 36 corridor between Denver and Boulder was home to a ton of storage tech startups in the first dotcom boom. There’s still a street called “Tape Drive”.

The API was 10% of the company’s revenue before Musk took over. That’s a good amount of value.

The v2 API was built over the last several years. It’s not new and was announced a long time ago, well before the acquisition.

Source: led the search API at Twitter until last year.

There is one SRE left from that team. That’s it.

You need both. Without the free API you don’t have a funnel of new customers who can grow into the enterprise tiers.

They have a hell of a lot to do with each other beyond that too.

(Led the search API team at Twitter and worked on both API platforms)

Showing ads isn’t enough. You need to count as impressions to bill advertisers and convince them to trust the impression data coming from third party clients.

Twitter made hundreds of millions a year selling API access.

We gave academic researchers free access to the full archive search API to help cover that use case.

Delivering old tweets is actually more expensive than real-time because nothing is cached. Streaming access is pretty much all served out of memory.

I used to lead the search and historical API team at Twitter.

Wanting peace is a good thing. Wanted Ukraine to capitulate to genocide is not.