Elon Musk Values Twitter At $20 Billion

According to an internal memo viewed by American news media, Elon Musk has estimated the current value of Twitter at $20 billion, which is less than half the $44 billion he spent for the social media network only five months earlier.

The communication to staff members discussed a new equity incentive plan for the San Francisco-based business and the distribution of shares to workers at X Holdings, the parent company of Twitter since Musk acquired it in late October.

The platform is valued at $20 billion according to the compensation plan, which is just a little bit more than either Pinterest ($18.7 billion) or Snapchat’s parent firm Snap ($18.2 billion), both of which, unlike Twitter, are publicly listed.

Musk, who is also the chief executive of Tesla Inc. and aerospace group SpaceX, said that Twitter would allow its employees to cash in shares every six months.
A query from AFP emailed to Twitter’s communications department generated an automatic response in the form of a poop emoji.

In the internal email, Musk describes the brutal contraction in Twitter’s value. He says the platform faced such grave financial difficulties that at one point it was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Elon Musk To Lays Off Half Of Twitter’s Employees

“Twitter was trending to lose ~$3B/year,” Musk said in a message posted Saturday on the platform.
He cited a revenue drop of $1.5 billion a year and a debt-servicing burden of the same amount — leaving it with “only 4 months of money.”
Musk, Twitter’s majority shareholder, added simply: “Extremely dire situation.”

But he then said that “It looks like we will break even” in the second quarter of the year, with advertisers — many of whom fled the platform after the mercurial billionaire bought it — now beginning to return.

Since taking control, Musk has sharply cut the group’s payroll from 7,500 employees to fewer than 2,000.

He said in the email that he sees a “clear but difficult path” to a valuation of $250 billion, without specifying how long that might take.

Twitter Staff Sue Elon Musk Over Mass Layoffs Without Adequate Notice

However, in another setback for the company, fragments of Twitter’s source code were published on the development platform GitHub, the latter told AFP on Sunday, confirming a report by the New York Times.

GitHub removed the files from its site at Twitter’s request, but their brief exposure could allow hackers to identify flaws in Twitter’s original software.

AFP

Follow us on Facebook