Elon Musk has put the current value of microblogging Twitter at USD 20 billion, less than half the USD 44 billion he paid for the social media platform just five months ago, according to sources.
The email to employees dealt with a new stock compensation program in the San Francisco-based company and the attribution to employees of stock in X Holdings, Twitter's umbrella company since Musk purchased it in late October.
The compensation plan values the platform at USD 20 billion, slightly more than that of Snap (USD 18.2 billion), parent company of Snapchat, or of social network and creative website Pinterest (USD 18.7 billion), both of which, unlike Twitter, are publicly traded.
In the internal email, Musk describes the brutal contraction in Twitter's value. He says the platform faced such grave financial difficulties that at one point it was on the verge of bankruptcy.
"Twitter was trending to lose USD 3B/year," Musk said in a message posted on the platform.
He cited a revenue drop of USD 1.5 billion a year and a debt-servicing burden of the same amount – leaving it with "only 4 months of money."
Musk, Twitter's majority shareholder, added simply: "Extremely dire situation."
But he then said that with advertisers – many of whom fled the platform after the mercurial billionaire bought it – now beginning to return, "It looks like we will break even" in the second quarter of the year.
Since taking control, Musk has sharply trimmed the group's payroll, from 7,500 to fewer than 2,000 employees.
He said in the email that he sees a "clear but difficult path" to a valuation of USD 250 billion, without saying how long that might take.
Musk, who is also the chief executive of Tesla Inc. and aerospace group SpaceX, said that Twitter would allow employees of the social network to cash in shares every six months.