Former Microsoft exec says the first Xbox was killed early in favor of 360 because it was "losing money left right and center," but luckily "we could afford to hemorrhage cash"

Original Xbox console.

The original Xbox console was short-lived compared to a typical console generation, and now we have the very simple reason why: it was a financial disaster for Microsoft.

It's fairly common knowledge that Microsoft lost more than $4 billion dollars on the OG Xbox, and it's probably also pretty common to infer that that's the reason it was killed ahead of schedule to make room for the Xbox 360, but now we know that to be explicitly true thanks to the guy who was in charge of Xbox at the time.