Twitter is now worth half of the $44B Elon Musk paid for it: Report

cointelegraph.com:

Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (formerly Twitter), is worth less than half of what the tech billionaire bought it for in October last year, an internal memo has reportedly revealed.

According to an Oct. 30 report from Bloomberg, the internal memo and sources familiar with the matter said that restricted stock units recently paid to employees of the company were valued at $45 a share, which puts the company’s value at around $19 billion, less than half of the $44 billion that Musk paid for the company on Oct. 27, 2022.

Musk has made a series of controversial moves since taking over the platform, including rebranding it to X, changing many of its content rules and laying off approximately 80% of the company’s workforce.

Musk’s drastic changes, along with his outspoken presence on the platform also appears to have made his company less popular with advertisers, with Bloomberg estimating that X has now lost at least half of its total advertising revenue.

Meanwhile, the significant drop in revenue has made the servicing of Musk’s debt worrisome for the firm as a whole. As of the time of publication, X reportedly owes around $1.2 billion in interest payments on its roughly $13 billion in total debt.

Musk has made it clear that he wants to rely more heavily on paid user subscriptions, but as of right now, less than 1% of the platform's total user base has decided to fork over money for a premium subscription — which equates to less than $120 million in annual revenue.

Cointelegraph contacted X for comment but did not receive an immediate response.

Related: Elon Musk says posts busted by Community Notes won’t earn revenue share

On the other hand, some have seen benefits to Elon Musk’s tenure at the company.

One of the