Twitter boss Elon Musk. DADO RUVIC / REUTERS
The boss of Tesla had acquired the social network for 44 billion dollars five months ago.
Elon Musk currently estimates the value of Twitter at 20 billion dollars, against 44 billion five months ago when the social network was acquired by the entrepreneur, according to an internal document consulted by several American media. The internal letter to employees concerned profit sharing within the San Francisco group and the allocation of shares in X Holdings, the company that has overseen Twitter since its takeover at the end of October.
The share grant program values the platform at 20 billion dollars, close to the capitalization of Snap (18.2 billion), parent company of Snapchat, or the social network and creative site Pinterest (18.7), all two sides. Solicited by AFP via the email address dedicated to the press, Twitter generated an automatic response containing only an emoji in the shape of a pile of excrement.
A loss of turnover of 1.5 billion dollars
In the internal document, Elon Musk justifies the brutal contraction of the valuation by the financial difficulties experienced by the group, a time on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, according to him. “Twitter was set to lose $3 billion a year“Wrote Elon Musk in a message posted on the platform on Saturday. This figure is explained, according to him, by a loss of turnover of 1.5 billion dollars and maturities of debt of an equivalent amount. “But now that advertisers are coming back, it looks like we’re going to break even in Q2.2023, said the CEO and majority shareholder of Twitter.
Read alsoAurélie Jean: “Is Elon Musk really going to make Twitter transparent?”
Since taking control, Elon Musk has reduced the group’s workforce from 7,500 to less than 2,000 employees by resorting to successive waves of layoffs. In the internal document, Elon Musk says he foresees “a difficult but clear pathtowards a valuation of the group around 250 billion dollars, without mentioning a deadline. The man who is also at the helm of Tesla and the aerospace group SpaceX announced that Twitter would open a window every six months allowing employees of the social network to sell their titles, which are no longer listed.
In addition, fragments of Twitter’s source code have been published on the GitHub development platform, the latter told AFP on Sunday, confirming information from the New York Times. At the request of the social network, GitHub removed these files from its site, but the fact that they were exposed to them, even briefly, could allow hackers to identify flaws in Twitter’s original software.
