Elon Musk claimed in an internal email that Twitter is currently valued at $20 billion, less than half of the $44 billion it was bought for five months ago.
The email to employees follows a new stock compensation program in the San Francisco-based company and the allocation of shares to employees of X Holdings, Twitter’s umbrella company after Musk bought it in late October.
The compensation plan values the platform at $20 billion, slightly more than Snapchat’s parent company Snap ($18.2 billion) or Pinterest ($18.7 billion), both of which are publicly traded, unlike Twitter.
Musk, who is also the chief executive of Tesla Inc and aerospace group SpaceX, said Twitter would allow its employees to redeem shares every six months.
An AFP query emailed to Twitter’s communications department generated an automated response in the form of a poop emoji.
In internal emails, Musk describes a brutal contraction in Twitter’s value. They say that the platform faced such severe financial difficulties that at one point it was on the verge of bankruptcy.
“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 then he said “it looks like we’ll break-even” in the second quarter of the year, with advertisers — many of whom fled the platform after the businessman billionaire bought it — now beginning to return.
Since taking control, Musk has reduced 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 $250 billion valuation, without specifying how long it could take.
However, in another blow to the company, pieces of Twitter’s source code were published on the development platform GitHub, the latter told AFP on Sunday, confirming a New York Times report.
Information Source: HT
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