Am I missing something, or is cost saving work systematically undervalued?

Pricing cost savings as breakeven at 25x seems high, but it's a common sentiment. Before joining Twitter, I had a "sell" call with the then-CTO who said the same thing: if a senior eng saves $10M/yr (25:1), that would be considered poor performance and should be a no hire.

That's incredible! Twitter had maybe 2k eng at the time. If each made $10M/yr at the margin, the company would increase its profit by $20B/yr/yr.