Majority of those losses is because Twitter pays its employees large amounts of stock to retain them. Check out this analysis on how exorbitant Twitter's stock based compensation is vs. Facebook: https://medium.com/@fwiwm2c/stock-based-compensation-faceboo...

That's probably the only good thing about Twitter then. The people making the site should be better rewarded than those at the top, that have less to do with it.

So if the stock price collapses, losses will decrease?

If their employee compensation, which includes stock-based compensation, decreases then their expenses will go down and their losses will decrease. Of course, presumably their ability to attract and retain employees will also decrease.

A lower stock price could translate into lower stock-based compensation costs but you'd have to dive into the details of what they issue and how they issue it.

the problem is that by other metrics twitter is doing pretty well. There are very important people who will engage you in conversation (such as here) and ask you to DM them on twitter. That's insane.

What do you think would happen if Twitter didn't exist? You'd probably just email them or something.

huh? If cell phones didn't exist, you would make an arrangement to go meet someone at a certain time and place, and if you both didn't show up, OH WELL. "stood up".

That doesn't diminish from the value and buy-in of cell phones and is a bizarre argument to make regarding the value, if any, of twitter.

I don't really get this analogy. Cell phones are a qualitative improvement in that situation. How is sending a DM an improvement over sending an email?

I guarantee you that every single person sending and receiving DM's has an email address, so you'll have to ask them.

Ask you to what? Deathmatch?

Pretty sure "DM" here stands for "Direct Message", i.e. private message.

regardless, it is a preferred method of communication (to the exclusion of other types) of many people, and is absolutely huge.