For Elon Musk, his investment in Twitter is not yet synonymous with profitability. The entrepreneur currently estimates the value of the social network at $ 20 billion, against $ 44 billion five months ago at the time of its acquisition, according to an internal document seen by several US media.

The internal letter to employees concerned profit-sharing within the San Francisco group and the allocation of shares in X Holdings, the company that has overseen Twitter since its acquisition at the end of October. The program to grant shares values the platform at $ 20 billion, close to the capitalization of Snap (18.2 billion), parent company of Snapchat, or the social network and creative site Pinterest (18.7), both listed. Solicited via the email address dedicated to the press, Twitter generated an automatic response containing only an emoji in the form of a pile of excrement.

A company once on the verge of bankruptcy

In the internal document, Elon Musk justifies the sharp contraction of the valuation by the financial difficulties experienced by the group, a time on the verge of bankruptcy, according to him. "Twitter was set to lose $3 billion a year," Musk wrote in a message posted Saturday on the platform.

This figure is explained, according to him, by a loss of turnover of $ 1.5 billion and debt maturities of an 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 the chief executive and majority shareholder of Twitter.

Since taking control, Elon Musk has reduced the group's workforce from 7,500 to less than 2,000 employees by resorting to successive waves of layoffs. In the internal document, he said he saw "a difficult but clear path" towards a valuation of the group around $ 250 billion, but without mentioning a deadline. The one who is also at the helm of Tesla and the aerospace group SpaceX announced that Twitter would open, every six months, a window allowing employees of the social network to sell their securities, which are no longer listed.

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