According to an internal email obtained by American news outlets, Elon Musk has valued Twitter at $20 billion, less than half the $44 billion he paid for the social media platform just five months ago.
The email to employees mentioned a new stock compensation program and the distribution of shares to employees of X Holdings, Twitter’s umbrella company since Musk purchased it in late October.
The platform is valued at $20 billion in the compensation plan, which is 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, the CEO of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, announced that Twitter employees would be able to cash in their shares every six months.
An AFP inquiry sent to Twitter’s communications department elicited an automatic response in the form of a poop emoji.
Musk describes the brutal decline in Twitter’s value in an internal email. He claims that the platform faced such severe financial difficulties that it was on the verge of bankruptcy at one point.
“Twitter was trending to lose $3 billion per year,” Musk said in a message posted on the platform on Saturday.
He cited a $1.5 billion drop in revenue per year and a debt-servicing burden of the same amount, leaving it with “only 4 months of money.”
Musk, who owns the majority of Twitter, added simply, “Extremely dire situation.”
However, he later stated that “it appears that we will break even” in the second quarter of the year, with advertisers, many of whom fled the platform after the mercurial billionaire purchased it, now beginning to return.
Musk has reduced the group’s payroll from 7,500 to fewer than 2,000 employees since taking over.
In the email, he stated that he sees a “clear but difficult path” to a valuation of $250 billion, but he did not specify 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 on Sunday, according to the latter, confirming a New York Times report.
The files were removed from GitHub at Twitter’s request, but their brief exposure may have allowed hackers to identify flaws in Twitter’s original software.
