Twitter mogul Elon Musk told his employees in an internal statement that Twitter’s value has fallen to US$20 billion, less than half of the US$44 billion he paid in its purchase in October last year.
In the email note, to which several American media outlets such as the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times had access, Musk comments that Twitter is “transforming so rapidly” that it can already be considered “a startup in reverse.”
The statement, dated last Friday (24), was sent out by Musk to explain to employees a stock compensation program, which would be calculated according to the company’s new value.
Musk did not return calls from any media outlets for comment on the matter, and the company responded to requests for confirmation with emojis.
The billionaire, who since his arrival at Twitter has reduced staffing to nearly a quarter of the workforce and sold much of the furniture at the San Francisco headquarters, has failed to avoid losing a large number of advertisers, the social network’s main source of revenue, and his new “Twitter Blue” doesn’t seem to have improved things either.
Still, in his email last Friday, Musk said that more radical changes would need to be implemented to avoid the company’s bankruptcy.
On the other hand, the New York Times reported that Twitter’s source code – the digital programming language on which the platform is based – was shared on the networks, probably “for months,” until the company reported it last Friday in a northern California court.
That same day, Twitter uploaded a copy of copyright infringement to the GitHub platform, where many software developers share material, and from that moment on, the source code information disappeared from there, with no word so far on who could be behind this leak.
With information from EFE