The platform was bought privately by Elon Musk for $44 billion a year ago, but it is now only valued at $19 billion. The value comes from how the company figures out a worker’s equity plan.
Fortune says that Elon Musk’s X/Twitter has introduced a new stock plan for employees. The plan gives employees restricted stock units (RSUs), with each of the shares worth $45. Based on these numbers, the company is only valued at $19 billion, which is about 55% less than Elon Musk’s original buying price of $44 billion.
Even worse losses have been suffered by other groups that helped Musk take over. According to Axios, Fidelity put $300 million into Musk’s plan to buy out Twitter. The company has since written down the value of the investment by a shocking 65%.
The Wall Street Journal says that the banks that gave Musk billions of dollars to finish the deal also expect to lose money:
“After having the debt for an entire year—which is an eternity within the corporate-finance world—the financial institutions, which were hoping they would be able to sell it before Labor Day, are currently making preparations for an attempt to unload at least a portion of it,” sources said.
“They must first get a rating from organizations such as Moody’s and S&P, which is often a quality seal requirement for investors like mutual funds as well as loan managers. In the event X gets a bad credit rating, it will be hard for financial institutions to sell the debt to a larger number of investors without losing even more money than they expected.”
Tesla CEO Elon Musk said that X/Twitter is going through a time of “negative cash flow.” Musk said that this financial stress was caused by a number of things, including a big drop of 50 percent in advertising income and a lot of debt.
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