The owner of Twitter, Elon Musk, estimates the current value of that social network at 20,000 million dollars, less than half of when he bought it five months ago, according to an internal document consulted by the North American media.
At the time, the social network was worth 44,000 million dollars (almost 41,000 million euros, at the current exchange rate).
The internal letter addressed to employees concerns the San Francisco group’s profit sharing and allocation of shares in X Holdings, the company that has overseen Twitter since its acquisition in late October.
The equity grant program values the platform at US$20,000 million (€18,585 million), close to the capitalization of Snap (US$18.2 billion), which controls Snapchat, or the social network and creative website Pinterest ($18.7 billion), both listed.
The AFP says that it requested a comment through the email address dedicated to the press, and Twitter generated an automatic response containing only “an ’emoji’ in the form of a pile of excrement”.
In the internal document, Elon Musk justifies this brutal contraction of valuation by the financial difficulties experienced by the group, a time on the verge of bankruptcy, according to himself.
“Twitter was destined to lose 3,000 million dollars (2,787 million euros)”, wrote Elon Musk in a message published on the social network on Saturday.
This number is explained, according to Elon Musk, by a turnover loss of 1,500 million dollars (1,393 million euros) and debt maturities of an equivalent amount.
“But now advertisers are coming back, it looks like we’re going to break even in the second quarter” of this year, said the executive president and majority shareholder of Twitter.
Since taking control of the social network, Musk has reduced the number of workers from 7,500 to less than 2,000, resorting to successive waves of redundancies.
In the internal document, Elon Musk said he saw “a difficult but clear path” to an assessment of the group at around 250,000 million dollars, without mentioning a deadline.
The leader of Tesla and the SpaceX aerospace group announced that Twitter would open a window every six months to allow employees of the social network to sell their stakes, which are no longer listed on the stock exchange.
