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.