Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion dollars in 2022. Now, however, he sees the company as worth less than half of what he paid last year. He reveals it in a communication that the tycoon made to the employees of the social network to explain a new compensation program in shares, for a value of almost 20,000 million dollars
Twitter is “transforming so rapidly” that it can now be seen as “a start up the other way around,” Musk says in the note emailed to his workers, which they had access to The Wall Street Journal and other media. He explains that the brutal fall in the value of the company is due to a loss of turnover of $1.5 billion dollars. It also mentions debt maturities for another equivalent amount.
Twitter was meant to lose 3 billion dollars a yearMusk said. “But now that advertisers are coming back, it looks like we’re going to break even in the second quarter” of 2023, said the also CEO and majority shareholder of Twitter.
Elon Musk says Twitter has a “clear but difficult” path to recovery
Elon Musk also told Twitter employees that he sees a “clear but difficult path” to the company’s recovery. He predicted that if all goes as planned, the company would be worth a few $250 billion in the future, 10 times the current value. Musk said he would allow staff to sell Twitter shares every six months, a policy similar to that of SpaceX, another of his companies.
Musk’s arrival at the company has not only caused advertisers to flee. Twitter experienced at least four widespread outages last February. This, compared with nine registered in all of 2022, according to NetBlocks, a company that tracks Internet interruptions.
Twitter has lost more than half of its workforce, by layoffs or resignations, since Musk took over. Among those who left, according to what employees and former employees have leaked, are several key teams for the maintenance, privacy and security of the platform.
This weekend it became known that some parts of Twitter’s source code had been leaked. A user named “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” posted it on Github, a platform owned by Microsoft, he detailed. Reuters. The information was open to the public for probably “for months”, until GitHub removed the files at the request of Twitter.