According to an internal email seen by American news media, Elon Musk has valued Twitter at $20 billion, which is less than half of the $44 billion he paid for the social media platform just five months ago.
The email to employees referred to 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 since Musk purchased 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 that Twitter would allow its employees to cash in shares every six months.
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.
However, he then said that “It looks like we will break even” in the second quarter of the year, with advertisers 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.
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.
Article updated 2 months ago. Content is written and modified by multiple authors.
