Elon Musk puts Twitter's current value at $20bn

According to an internal memo viewed by American news media, Elon Musk has estimated the current value of Twitter at $20 billion, which is less than half the $44 billion he spent on the social media network only five months earlier.

The communication to staff members discussed a new equity incentive plan for the San Francisco-based business and the distribution of shares to workers at X Holdings, the parent company of Twitter since Musk acquired it in late October.

The platform is valued at $20 billion according to the compensation plan, which is just a little bit more than either Pinterest ($18.7 billion) or Snapchat's parent firm Snap ($18.2 billion), both of which, unlike Twitter, are publicly listed.

The aerospace company SpaceX and Tesla Inc.'s top executive, Elon Musk, both announced that Twitter will permit its staff to sell shares every six months.

An automatic response in the form of a poop emoji was generated in response to an email from AFP to Twitter's communications team.

Musk outlines the dramatic decline in Twitter's valuation in the confidential email. He claims that the platform had severe financial issues to the point where it was almost insolvent at one point.

“Twitter was trending to lose ~$3B/year,” Musk said in a message posted Saturday on the platform.

He estimated a $1.5 billion annual sales decline and a $1.5 billion debt payment cost, leaving the company with "only 4 months of money."

Musk, Twitter’s majority shareholder, added simply: “Extremely dire situation.”

The mercurial billionaire then bought the platform, and many advertisers left, although he then added that "It looks like we will break even" in the second quarter of the year.

After assuming leadership, Musk has drastically reduced the organization's payroll from 7,500 personnel to under 2,000.

Without elaborating on how long that might take, he wrote in the email that he saw a "clear but tough road" leading to a valuation of $250 billion.

Yet in yet another setback for the business, bits of Twitter's source code was made public on the GitHub development platform, the latter revealed to AFP on Sunday, corroborating a New York Times article.

Twitter requested that GitHub delete the files from its website, however, due to their limited exposure, hackers may have been able to find bugs in Twitter's original program.

Source