Elon Musk reckons Twitter is worth just $20 billion

Businessman Elon Musk bought Twitter last fall.

Elon Musk currently values ​​Twitter at $20 billion Americans, compared to 44 five months ago when the entrepreneur acquired the social network, according to an internal document consulted by several American media.

The internal letter to employees concerned the incentive within the San Francisco group and the allocation of shares of X Holdings, the company that has overseen Twitter since its takeover at the end of October.

The share grant program values ​​the platform at 20 billion, close to the capitalization of Snap (18.2 billion), parent company of Snapchat, or the social network and creative site Pinterest ( 18.7 billion), both listed.

Solicited by AFP via the email address dedicated to the press, Twitter generated an automatic response containing only an emoji in the shape of a pile of excrement.

In the internal document, Elon Musk justifies the brutal contraction of the valuation by the financial difficulties experienced by the group, a time on the verge of filing for bankruptcy, according to him.

Twitter was set to lose $3 billion a year, Elon Musk wrote in a post on the platform on Saturday.

This is explained, according to him, by a loss of turnover of 1.5 billion and debt maturities of an equivalent amount.

But now that advertisers are returning, it looks like we'll break even in the second quarter of 2023, Twitter's chief executive and majority shareholder said.

Since his takeover, Elon Musk has reduced the group's workforce from 7,500 to less than 2,000 employees by resorting to successive waves of layoffs.

In the internal document, he says glimpse a difficult but clear path towards a valuation of the group around 250 billion dollars, without mentioning a deadline.

The one who is also at the helm of Tesla and the group aerospace SpaceX announced that Twitter would open, every six months, a window allowing employees of the social network to sell their titles, which are no longer listed.

In addition, fragments of the Twitter's source code have been published on the GitHub development platform, the latter told AFP on Sunday, confirming information from the New York Times.

At the request of the social network, GitHub removed these files from its site, but the fact that they were exposed to it, even briefly, would allow hackers to determine flaws in Twitter's original software.