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Twitter Value Dropped by 50 Percent Since Elon Musk Takeover

In autumn 2022, Elon Musk took over the short message service Twitter, paying Tesla and SpaceX boss $44 billion at the time. Now he has revealed in an internal email how much the company is worth today: less than half. But that should change.

Even at the time of the acquisition, there were many voices from economists who believed Musk was paying far too much for Twitter. It was partly his own fault because, in the weeks and months before, the billionaire had pushed the value down with his zigzag course – but he paid the originally agreed amount.

Twitter is now worth $20 billion

Of course, Musk knew that himself, because the Tesla boss admitted that he was “obviously paying too much”. That was also the reason why he wanted out of the deal. According to matching reports from Platformer and The Information, Musk has now revealed in an internal memo that Twitter is currently worth $20 billion. The background is share allocations for employees, which are calculated on the basis of the total value of the company.

However, Musk expects a massive trend reversal to occur under his leadership, as he sees “a clear but difficult path” to a valuation of $250 billion. As a result, the current share awards would be worth ten times what they are now.

Musk also explains in his letter how he sees Twitter, namely as a “reverse startup”. Because according to the 51-year-old, there were a number of necessary changes that he made to save the company from bankruptcy.

Lost Fifty Percent of advertisers too

How close that is to reality is hard to say. Because it is true that the numbers on Twitter before the Musk takeover were anything but good, but the politically conservative to right-wing Tesla boss also drove many advertisers off the platform with controversial actions and statements. A recent analysis by Vox shows that around half of the top 1,000 advertisers previously active on Twitter are no longer running ads on the platform following the acquisition.