The owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, estimates the current value of that social network at US$20,000 million, less than half of when he bought it five months ago, according to an internal document consulted by US media.
At that time, the social network was worth 44,000 million dollars (almost 41,000 million euros, at the current exchange rate).
The internal letter to employees concerns the San Francisco group’s profit-sharing and stock allocation in X Holdings, the company that has overseen Twitter since its acquisition in late October.
The capital grant program values the platform at 20,000 million dollars (18,585 million euros), close to the capitalization of Snap (18,200 million dollars), which controls Snapchat, or the social network and creative web Pinterest (18,700 million dollars), both listed.
AFP says it requested a comment via its dedicated press email address, and Twitter generated an automated response containing only “a smileys in the form of a pile of excrement”.
In the internal document, Elon Musk justifies this brutal contraction in the valuation due to the financial difficulties that the group is experiencing, for a time on the verge of bankruptcy, according to himself.
“Twitter was destined to lose 3,000 million dollars (2,787 million euros),” Elon Musk wrote in a message posted on the social network on Saturday.
This figure is explained, according to Elon Musk, by a turnover loss of 1,500 million dollars (1,393 million euros) and debt maturities for an equivalent amount.
“But now that advertisers are coming back, it looks like we’re going to break even in the second quarter” of this year, said Twitter’s chief executive and majority shareholder.
Since taking control of the social network, Musk has reduced the number of workers from 7,500 to less than 2,000, resorting to successive waves of layoffs.
In the internal document, Elon Musk said he saw “a difficult but clear path” toward a pool assessment of around $250 billion, without mentioning a deadline.
The leader of Tesla and the SpaceX aerospace group announced that Twitter would open a window every six months to allow employees of the social network to sell their shares, which are no longer publicly traded.
Source: TSF
