Elon Musk says Twitter valuation falls short of US$44 billion

NEW YORK: Elon Musk has put the current value of Twitter at US $20 billion, less than half of the US $44 billion he paid for the social media platform just five months ago, according to an internal email seen by American news media.

The email sent to employees dealt with a new stock compensation program in the San Francisco-based company and the attribution of employees' stock in X Holdings, Twitter's umbrella company since Musk purchased it in late October.

The compensation plan values the platform at US $20 billion, slightly more than that of Snap US $18.2 billion parent company of Snapchat, or of social network and creative website Pinterest US $18.7 billion, both of which are publicly traded.

An emailed query from AFP sent to Twitter's communications department generated an automatic response in the form of a poop emoji.

Musk describes the brutal contraction in Twitter's value in the internal email. He says that the platform was facing such grave financial difficulties that it was on the verge of bankruptcy.

Musk said on Saturday that Twitter was about to lose $3 billion and that it was trending to lose $3 billion.

He said a revenue drop of 1.5 billion a year and a debt-servicing burden of the same amount left it with only 4 months of money. 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 over, Musk has 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 US $250 billion, but he doesn't say how long that might take.

Musk, who is also the chief executive of SpaceX and Tesla Inc., said that Twitter would allow employees of the social network to cash in shares every six months.