Elon Musk has valued Twitter at $20 billion. Six months after the tycoon bought the social network for $44 billion, the businessman claimed that the company's current value is less than half of the purchase price he paid in October.
In an internal letter addressed to employees, which was accessed last Sunday by several U.S. media, Musk assured that this valuation was based on profit sharing within the group as well as from the value shares in X Holdings, the company that has overseen Twitter since Musk bought it in October:
NEW: Elon Musk sent Twitter employees an email about the state of Twitter 2.0. He acknowledged the company has been through a period of radical change but said the changes were necessary… 1/
— Zoë Schiffer (@ZoeSchiffer) March 25, 2023
The valuation, DW warns, is similar to that obtained by other smaller companies such as Snap, parent company of Snapchat, as well as the social network and image-creation portal Pinterest, whose valuations stand at, respectively, $18.2 billion and $18.7 billion.
Musk attempted to justify the drastic reduction in Twitter's value. He assured that the drop is a direct consequence of the financial difficulties experienced by the group, which he says is on the verge of bankruptcy:
Yeah, generally correct.
Titter was trending to lose ~$3B/year (revenue drop of ~$1.5B + debt servicing of ~$1.5B) and had $1B in cash, so only 4 months of money. Extremely dire situation.
Now that advertisers are returning, it looks like we will break even in Q2.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 25, 2023
Twitter source code leaked
While Musk was focusing on the real value of Twitter, the platform had an even bigger problem: part of its source code was leaked. The New York Times accessed a court notice in which the social network asked development platform GitHub to remove the leak after several Twitter executives discovered the problem.
GitHub, Europa Press reports, indeed removed the source code. In addition, the news agency said it is believed that the leak, which was brought to light by user FreeSpechEnthusiast in early January, may have come from former employee who worked at Twitter until last year.
