Elon Musk, owner of Twitter, has valued the social network at less than 20,000 million dollars, about 18,000 million euros, at present. It's less than half the $44 billion he paid for the company last October.
The figure comes from an internal assessment in an email sent to workers, in which Musk addresses the incentive plan in shares of X Holdings, the company that rules over Twitter after the purchase. Under the valuation of titles that is made in this plan, the company is valued at those 20,000 million. Workers will have windows to sell their shares, which are no longer publicly traded, every six months.
In the internal document, Musk justifies the enormous contraction in the valuation due to the financial difficulties the group is experiencing, which was on the verge of bankruptcy for some time, according to him.
The platform was on track to lose about $3 billion per year due to falling revenue and paying down debt, with just $1 billion in cash, enough to cover just 4 months, he explained in a tweet. "An extremely serious situation. Now that advertisers are returning after the initial flight, it seems that we will reach a break even point in the second quarter," he said on the social network.
Since taking control, Musk has reduced the group's headcount from 7,500 to fewer than 2,000 employees by resorting to successive waves of layoffs. In his letter, he says he sees "a difficult but clear path" toward a group valuation of around $250 billion, without mentioning a time frame. Musk's master plan involves turning Twitter into a platform capable of providing all kinds of services from a single application, from leisure to finance.
