Elon Musk has placed Twitter’s current valuation at $20 billion—less than half the $44 billion he paid for the platform just five months ago, according to an internal email seen by American news media. The message, addressed to employees, introduced a new stock‑compensation program for X Holdings, the umbrella company that has owned Twitter since Musk’s acquisition in late October. Under the plan, shares are valued at $20 billion, a figure that slightly exceeds the market capitalisations of Snap’s parent company ($18.2 billion) and Pinterest ($18.7 billion), both of which are publicly traded, unlike Twitter.
Musk, who also serves as chief executive of Tesla Inc. and SpaceX, said the program will allow employees to cash in shares every six months. In response to a query from AFP, Twitter’s communications department sent an automatic reply consisting of a poop emoji. In the internal email, Musk described a “brutal contraction” in Twitter’s value, noting that the platform once teetered on the brink of bankruptcy. He wrote that Twitter was on track to lose roughly $3 billion per year, citing a $1.5 billion annual revenue decline and an equivalent debt‑servicing burden, which left the company with “only four months of money.” He labeled the situation “extremely dire,” but added that the company appears set to break even in the second quarter as advertisers—many of whom had fled after his purchase—begin to return.
Since taking control, Musk has dramatically reduced the workforce from 7,500 employees to fewer than 2,000. He told employees that he sees a “clear but difficult path” to a $250 billion valuation, though he did not specify a timeline. Meanwhile, a separate setback emerged when fragments of Twitter’s source code were posted on the development platform GitHub, confirming a report by the New York Times. GitHub removed the files at Twitter’s request, but the brief exposure could enable hackers to identify vulnerabilities in the platform’s original software.
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