The business tycoon Elon Musk estimates that currently the value of the social network Twitter It is 20,000 million dollars (18,500 million euros), less than half of what the also owner of Tesla paid for its acquisition. Five months ago he paid a total of 44,000 million dollars, according to an internal document cited by various US media. Requested by AFP through the email address dedicated to the press, Twitter generated an automatic response that contained only an emoji in the form of a pile of excrement.
Musk undertook the purchase of Twitter through different sources of financing. On the one hand, the head of Tesla agreed to a loan of 13,000 million with a group of banks led by Morgan Stanley, Barclays and Bank of America, which set interest of about 1,500 million per year to help finance. That debt was corporately tied to Twitter, not Musk.
The internal letter to employees concerned profit-sharing within the San Francisco-based group and allocation of shares in X Holdings, the company that has overseen Twitter since its acquisition in late October. The stock grant program values the platform at $20 billion, close to the capitalization of Snap ($18.2 billion), parent company of Snapchator the social network and creative image portal Pinterest (18,700 million).
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In the internal document, Elon Musk justifies the brutal contraction of the valuation due to the financial difficulties that the group is experiencing, for a time on the verge of bankruptcy, according to him. “Twitter was destined to lose 3 billion dollars a year“, he wrote in a message published on the platform on Saturday. That figure is explained, according to him, by a loss of billing of 1,500 million dollars and debt maturities for another equivalent amount.
“But now that advertisers are coming back, it looks like we’re going to break even in the second quarter” of 2023, said Twitter’s chief executive and majority shareholder. Since he took control, Elon Musk, also the owner of the aerospace firm SpaceX and the electric car maker Tesla, has reduced the workforce of the group of 7,500 to less than 2,000 employees resorting to successive waves of layoffs.