For his next magical trick...
Hell, Meet Handbasket
It's been a little over a year since Elon Musk bought Twitter, and in that time, the company's self-proclaimed value has plummeted more than 50 percent.
First reported by Fortune, the valuation of the since-renamed X was listed as just $19 billion in its new employee equity plan — a 55 percent drop from the $44 billion Musk paid for it in October of last year.
According to documents reviewed by The Verge, the company declared that "the fair market value per share is determined by the Board of Directors based on a number of factors in a manner that complies with applicable tax rules." As that outlet points out, Musk is currently X's chair, and in his year of ownership, he hasn't yet appointed a formal board after dissolving the old one as one of his first acts of ownership.
Bleaker still, it's possible that X's self-valuation may still be inflated given that Fidelity, one of Musk's biggest investors in the site, marked down the site's worth by 65 percent, which would make it worth a paltry $15.4 billion. That figure, despite some increases in the mutual fund's reported stock valuation for Twitter earlier this year, is roughly in line with the $15 billion it valued the company at over the summer.
A Busy Year
These latest numbers aren't exactly shocking given everything that's happened in the year since Musk took over Twitter, of course.
Between laying off or driving away 80 percent of the company's previous 7,500-person staff, changing its name to X as part of his obsession with building an "everything app," de-verifying legacy blue checks and granting them to anyone who throws $8 bucks his way, hemorrhaging both advertisers and users and altogether making the site even more hellish than it was before, Musk has transformed Twitter into a gross facsimile of what it once was — and those of us who were on it in the pre-Elon era remember that it was no cakewalk then, either.
It makes perfect sense that the site is now valued at less than half of what he bought it for, which seems very much like just desserts.
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