According to The Wall Street Journal, Elon Musk has valued Twitter at approximately $20 billion, significantly lower than the $44 billion he paid to acquire the social media company just six months ago. In an employee email, he stated that their stock awards would be based on this new valuation. Mr. Musk also referred to Twitter as an "inverse startup" due to the quick changes he has implemented in the past five months. Meanwhile, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index, his net worth decreased by around $100 billion during this same period.
In an email, Mr. Musk stated that he sees a challenging yet feasible route toward achieving a valuation of over $250 billion. Twitter has primarily generated revenue through online advertising, but several prominent advertisers have pulled out after Mr. Musk's controversial platform acquisition. Mr. Musk has reintroduced the subscription service Twitter Blue to compensate for these losses. In a Twitter Spaces session held in December, he explained that the company's financial situation has compelled him to take drastic measures to reduce expenses.
Mr. Musk stated that he has been aggressively slashing costs over the past five weeks, and believes that Twitter will be able to achieve rough cash flow breakeven next year. As part of this cost-cutting initiative, the company has downsized its workforce from approximately 7,500 to under 2,000 employees. There was no comment from Twitter representatives regarding the recent valuation, as Mr. Musk's takeover resulted in the disbandment of the company's communication team.
The team's email address, press@twitter.com, now responds with an auto-reply featuring a poop emoji.
In unrelated news, Twitter disclosed in court documents that some of its source code had been exposed online, sparking concerns about its security. Legal papers filed in the US District Court of the Northern District of California claimed that a hacker known as FreeSpeechEnthusiast had uploaded fragments of Twitter's underlying code to the GitHub platform.
In an email, Mr. Musk stated that he sees a challenging yet feasible route toward achieving a valuation of over $250 billion. Twitter has primarily generated revenue through online advertising, but several prominent advertisers have pulled out after Mr. Musk's controversial platform acquisition. Mr. Musk has reintroduced the subscription service Twitter Blue to compensate for these losses. In a Twitter Spaces session held in December, he explained that the company's financial situation has compelled him to take drastic measures to reduce expenses.
Mr. Musk stated that he has been aggressively slashing costs over the past five weeks, and believes that Twitter will be able to achieve rough cash flow breakeven next year. As part of this cost-cutting initiative, the company has downsized its workforce from approximately 7,500 to under 2,000 employees. There was no comment from Twitter representatives regarding the recent valuation, as Mr. Musk's takeover resulted in the disbandment of the company's communication team.
The team's email address, press@twitter.com, now responds with an auto-reply featuring a poop emoji.
In unrelated news, Twitter disclosed in court documents that some of its source code had been exposed online, sparking concerns about its security. Legal papers filed in the US District Court of the Northern District of California claimed that a hacker known as FreeSpeechEnthusiast had uploaded fragments of Twitter's underlying code to the GitHub platform.