Elon Musk has put the current value of Twitter at US$20 billion (RM88.56 billion), less than half the US$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 programme in the San Francisco-based company and the attribution to employees of stock in X Holdings, Twitter’s umbrella company since Musk purchased it in late October.
An emailed query from AFP sent to Twitter’s communications department generated an automatic response in the form of a poop emoji.
He cited a revenue drop of US$1.5 billion a year and a debt-servicing burden of the same amount — leaving it with “only 4 months of money”.
Musk, Twitter’s 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 group’s 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 US$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. — AFP