Elon Musk puts Twitter’s value at $20 billion the current value is less than half the $44 billion he paid for the social media platform just five months ago, as per the internal email seen by American news media.
The email to employees mention to a new stock defence program in the San Francisco-based company and the allotment of shares to employees of X Holdings. Twitter’s umbrella company since Musk purchased it in late October.
Compensation plan values the platform at $20 billion, somewhat more than Snapchat’s parent company Snap ($18.2 billion) or Pinterest ($18.7 billion), both of which publicly traded, unlike Twitter.
Musk, who is also the chief executive of Tesla Inc. and aerospace group SpaceX, said that. Twitter would permit its employees to cash in shares every six months.
A question from AFP emailed to Twitter’s communications department create 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 serious financial trouble that at one point it was on the edge of bankruptcy.
“Twitter was trending to lose ~$3B/year,” Musk said in a message posted Saturday on the platform.
He cited a revenue fall 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 bulk 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 run the platform later the erratic billionaire bought it — now beginning to return.
Since taking control, Musk has quickly cut the group’s payroll from 7,500 employees to less than 2,000.
He said in the email that he sees a “clear but difficult path” to a price of $250 billion, without specifying how long that might take.
Elon Musk puts Twitter’s value at $20 billion. Yet, in another reverse for the company, part of Twitter’s source code 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 short aspect could allow hackers to determine flaws in Twitter’s original software.