According to an email Elon Musk addressed to the company’s staff on Friday, Twitter is now only worth roughly $20 billion, down significantly from the $44 billion he paid to purchase the social network in October.
The email was sent to staff members to inform them of a new stock compensation program, and it was viewed by The New York Times.
In it, Mr. Musk warned staff that Twitter’s financial situation was still shaky and that the company was once just four months away from going bankrupt.
He claimed that the business needed to undergo “radical changes,” such as cost-cutting and mass layoffs, in order to stay afloat and run more efficiently.
“Twitter is being reshaped rapidly,” Mr. Musk wrote, adding that the company could be thought of as “an inverse start-up.”
With a worth of $20 billion, Twitter is somewhat more valuable than Snap, the parent company of Snapchat, which has recently struggled with a decline in advertising and forecasted revenue declines.
As of the company’s final public filing before going private, Snap had a market capitalization of roughly $18 billion and had about 375 million daily active users, compared to 237.8 million for Twitter.
A request for response from Mr. Musk went unanswered, and an email sent to Twitter’s relations team was answered with a feces emoji. The Information first revealed the new worth of the corporation.
Twitter employees will get stock in X Corporation, the holding firm Mr. Musk created to purchase the company, according to his email announcing the new equity incentive program.
The $20 billion valuation will apply to the rewards. In the email, Mr. Musk also expressed his opinion that Twitter may one day be worth $250 billion.
Mr. Musk noted that Twitter intends to follow the same procedure as his privately held rocket business SpaceX and permit employees to sell the stock every six months.
Employees would have access to “liquid stock, but without the stock price chaos and lawsuit burden of a public company,” according to Mr. Musk’s letter.
New York Times
