India March 27(IM): Elon Musk has put the current value of Twitter at dollar 20 billion, less than half the dollar 44 billion he paid for the social media platform just five months ago, according to an internal email seen by American news media.
The email to employees dealt with a new stock compensation program in the San Franciscobased company and the attribution to employees of stock in X Holdings, Twitters umbrella company since Musk purchased it in late October.
The compensation plan values the platform at dollar 20 billion, slightly more than that of Snap dollar 18.2 billion, parent company of Snapchat, or of social network and creative website Pinterest dollar 18.7 billion, both of which, unlike Twitter, are publicly traded.
An emailed query from AFP sent to Twitters communications department generated an automatic response in the form of a poop emoji.
In the internal email, Musk describes the brutal contraction in Twitters value. He says the platform faced such grave financial difficulties that at one point it was on the verge of bankruptcy.
Twitter was trending to lose dollar 3B by year, Musk said in a message posted Saturday on the platform.
He cited a revenue drop of dollar 1.5 billion a year and a debtservicing burden of the same amount leaving it with only 4 months of money.
Musk, Twitters majority shareholder, added simply: Extremely dire situation.
But he then said that with advertisers many of whom fled the platform after the mercurial billionaire bought it now beginning to return, It looks like we will break even in the second quarter of the year.
Since taking control, Musk has sharply trimmed the groups payroll, from 7,500 to fewer than 2,000 employees.
He said in the email that he sees a clear but difficult path to a valuation of dollar 250 billion, without saying how long that might take.
Musk, who is also the chief executive of Tesla Inc. and aerospace group SpaceX, said that Twitter would allow employees of the social network to cash in shares every six months.
source : NDTV
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