Elon Musk estimates that Twitter is worth less than half of what he paid to acquire it

The stock grant program values ​​the platform at $20 billion, close to the capitalization of Snap ($18.2 billion), Snapchat’s parent company, or the social network and creative image portal Pinterest ($18.7 billion).

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.

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 a year,” he wrote in a message posted to the platform on Saturday.

That figure is explained, according to him, by a loss of billing of 1.5 billion 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 officer and majority shareholder.

Since taking control, Elon Musk, also the owner of aerospace firm SpaceX and electric car maker Tesla, has reduced the group’s workforce from 7,500 to fewer than 2,000 employees through successive waves of layoffs.