Elon Musk has put the current value of Twitter 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 American news media.<\/p>\n
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\u2019s umbrella company since Musk purchased it in late October.<\/span><\/p>\n The compensation plan values the platform at $20 billion, slightly more than Snapchat\u2019s parent company Snap ($18.2 billion) or Pinterest ($18.7 billion), both of which are publicly traded, unlike Twitter.<\/span><\/p>\n 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.<\/span><\/p>\n A query from AFP emailed to Twitter\u2019s communications department generated an automatic response in the form of a poop emoji.<\/span><\/p>\n In the internal email, Musk describes the brutal contraction in Twitter\u2019s value. He says the platform faced such grave financial difficulties that at one point it was on the verge of bankruptcy.<\/span><\/p>\n \u201cTwitter was trending to lose ~$3B\/year,\u201d Musk said in a message posted Saturday on the platform.<\/span><\/p>\n He cited a revenue drop of $1.5 billion a year and a debt-servicing burden of the same amount \u2014 leaving it with \u201conly 4 months of money.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n Musk, Twitter\u2019s majority shareholder, added simply: \u201cExtremely dire situation.\u201d<\/span><\/p>\n But he then said that \u201cIt looks like we will break even\u201d in the second quarter of the year, with advertisers \u2014 many of whom fled the platform after the mercurial billionaire bought it \u2014 now beginning to return.<\/span><\/p>\n Since taking control, Musk has sharply cut the group\u2019s payroll from 7,500 employees to fewer than 2,000.<\/span><\/p>\n He said in the email that he sees a \u201cclear but difficult path\u201d to a valuation of $250 billion, without specifying how long that might take.<\/span><\/p>\n However, in another setback for the company, fragments of Twitter\u2019s source code were published on the development platform GitHub, the latter told AFP on Sunday, confirming a report by the New York Times.<\/span><\/p>\n GitHub removed the files from its site at Twitter\u2019s request, but their brief exposure could allow hackers to identify flaws in Twitter\u2019s original software.<\/span><\/p>\n AFP.<\/span><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Elon Musk has put the current value of Twitter at $20 billion, less than half the $44 billion he paid<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":1091,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_mi_skip_tracking":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1090","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1090"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":1092,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1090\/revisions\/1092"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/1091"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1090"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1090"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/thenewsnow.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1090"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}