“Temporarily before bankruptcy”
Twitter worth less than half the purchase price
3/27/2023 6:33 am
The takeover of Twitter by Elon Musk is causing a stir, and there has been a long debate about the purchase price. Almost half a year later, the billionaire recorded a blatant loss in value with his acquisition. On top of that, the short message service revealed an unusually serious data leak.
Tech entrepreneur Elon Musk has put Twitter’s current value at $20 billion – less than half of the $44 billion he contributed half a year ago paid for the takeover of the short message service. In an internal e-mail quoted by the US media, the entrepreneur describes the company’s loss in value and explains that the communication platform had such great financial difficulties that it was temporarily on the verge of bankruptcy.
The email was about a new share-based compensation program for employees. Musk expressed the expectation that the company could return to profitability in the second quarter as advertisers returned. He sees a “clear but difficult path” ahead of Twitter, on which the company’s value could rise to $250 billion. Musk did not say when this could happen.
Musk took over Twitter in October. The boss of the electric car manufacturer Tesla and the aerospace company SpaceX fired the top management of the online service and around half of the 7,500 employees at the time. Since then, Twitter has repeatedly suffered from technical glitches. Because the moderation of content has also been reduced, numerous companies are no longer advertising, which has resulted in a significant loss of revenue for the platform.
Parts of Twitter source code leaked online
There is no shortage of bad news on Twitter. Some parts of the source code had been made public. The social media platform is trying to find information about the alleged person responsible with the username “FreeSpeechEnthusiast”, according to a court filing. Twitter asked Microsoft’s own software developer platform Github to release “all identifying information” related to the user.
The excerpts of the Twitter source code that runs the company online have been published on Github by “FreeSpeechEnthusiast”. The company said it removed the code on Friday at Twitter’s request. Github did not immediately respond to inquiries about whether it provided such information to Twitter or how long the source code had been publicly available. Twitter also did not immediately respond to a request for comment.