Hey, one of these articles about “Elon’s Twitter isn’t paying its bills” finally said the quiet part out loud:<p>“…AWS is not willing to renegotiate the five-and-a-half year contract it signed with Twitter in 2020 … contract required Twitter to pay $510m over that period … signed when Twitter was expecting to [use AWS heavily], but that never occurred … meaning that Twitter is not fully making use of the contract. … Twitter [paid] $10m in AWS costs a few weeks ago … at least $70 million still outstanding…”<p>“Twitter uses Google Cloud to a greater degree … its own five-year contract worth $1bn … Twitter is up to date on payments”<p>So a $0.5bn contract for the cloud that apparently just serves Twitter Spaces, and a $1bn contract for the cloud that serves the rest of Twitter. “Not fully making use of that contract” indeed, I wonder what the actual utilization metrics say. We can guess: the article claims Twitter paid $10m while owing at least $80m, so this means Twitter is using at most 1/8th of the capacity. That’s very close to single-digit-percentage utilization - I understand why Amazon is avoiding re-negotiating that contract, it’s literally free money. Non-payment will certainly bring them back to the negotiating table.<p>Reporting on Twitter’s other non-payments of rent, services, etc. has been more careful to not hint at the reason for non-payment. After all, when someone’s being evasive about paying the rent, we all know it’s because they don’t have the money.
Elon's bold strategy of "not paying any of his bills" doesn't seem like a great way to keep a service up and running, but then again neither does firing any engineer who doesn't agree to be on call 24/7/365 to address Elon's little temper tantrums.
I’ve been curious how long you can get away with not paying your AWS bill before they start shutting your stuff off. Obviously it matters how big a customer you are, and I imagine AWS will put up with quite a bit in the hopes of having that contract honored before burning that bridge entirely.<p>What kinds of knobs does AWS have, I wonder? Not allowing new resources to get allocated? Eventually start draining existing resources? I imagine for stateful stuff like DB tables and EBS volumes they might keep them around but inaccessible to Twitter until they pay their bill.<p>I of course am a responsible individual with a flawless credit score so I have no experience with such things myself
Bet on an ecosystem. Waived due diligence. Didn't read the contract. Trampled the biosphere. Now trying to negotiate the bill. Ragequit incoming. Sells for pennies.<p>I have sympathy with consumers who don't read the terms. I laugh when rich people misspend billions.
I thought they have their own data centers. I doubt AWS would close their account or pause their control plane. It is more likely to turn into a new agreement of court forcing them to pay damage for long term contract and then quit the commitment.