NEW YORK, March 27: Elon Musk put Twitter’s current value at $20 billion, less than half the $44 billion he paid for the social media platform just five months ago, according to an internal email seen by the American media. The email to employees referred to a new stock compensation program at the San Francisco-based company and the allocation of shares to employees of X Holdings, Twitter’s umbrella company since 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), which are publicly traded, unlike Twitter. Musk, who is also the chief executive of Tesla Inc. and the SpaceX aerospace group, said Twitter would allow its employees to cash out shares every six months.
An AFP query emailed to Twitter’s communication department generated an automated response in the form of a poop emoji.
In the internal email, Musk describes the brutal contraction in the value of Twitter. He says the platform faced such severe financial difficulties that it was at one point on the verge of bankruptcy. “Twitter was trending to lose ~$3 billion/year,” Musk said in a message posted Saturday on the platform. He cited a drop in revenue of $1.5 billion a year and a debt service burden of the same amount, leaving him with “only 4 months of money.” Musk, Twitter’s majority shareholder, added simply: “Extremely serious situation.”
But then he said “it looks like we’ll break even” in the second quarter of the year, with advertisers, many of whom left the platform after the flighty billionaire bought it, now starting to come back. Since taking over, Musk has slashed 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 $250 billion valuation, without specifying how long it could take. take.
However, in another setback for the company, snippets of Twitter’s source code have been posted on development platform GitHub, the latter told AFP on Sunday, confirming a New York Times report. GitHub removed the files from its site at the request of Twitter, but their brief exposure could allow hackers to identify flaws in Twitter’s original software.
(RSS/AFP)
