An estimated $4 to $20 billion in value, what is he thinking?

  • I don’t think twitter has $30B in valuation left. Musk bought it for $44B (which was beyond its value at the time, but okay). Since his takeover, it’s lost between 50-60% of its value. That was as of several months ago, so I have to imagine it’s even less now.

    With the loss of brand equity, they might be sliding towards the single digit billions very quickly.

    He’s just setting money on fire at this point.

        • I don’t doubt the political part, but I find it really hard to interpret anything being done as something that will return any sort of value to Elon and not just make the investors he relies on to stay mega-rich to lose complete faith in him. Plus, his Twitter purchase is tied up financially with his other companies, so ruining it is very likely to have knock-on effects.

          ETA: I mean the investors of his other, actually successful companies.

      • He’s the largest shareholder and it’s a private company, which is why we depend on companies holding his debt for guesstimates about the valuation. There’s no market forces that are punishing him for bad decisions, other than him not being able to service his/twitter’s debt based on twitter’s dwindling income.

        Jack Dorsey and his Saudi partners agreed to hold onto their shares (ie, not force Musk to buy them) and together they held about $3.5B out of the $44B valuation when it went private. Dorsey just started offering some super gentle criticism while saying it’s a very hard job.

        I don’t know if they’re under NDAs, or if they’re afraid of crashing their investments further by criticizing him in public, or if they just don’t care because what’s a few billion between friends. Maybe they’re sending him angry texts.

        I’m just hoping that someone comes out with a tell-all that ends up being a movie called The Anti-Social Network.

      • TWTR had about 765M shares outstanding. I didn’t follow them throughout the entire run up to the Muskening, but it looked like they were averaging somewhere in the neighborhood of $35/share, meaning their valuation would be about $25-30B. I’m deliberately ignoring the fact that they went into the 60s and 70s for an extended period in 2021 because I’m not sure what was driving that apart from cheap money and higher online activity during covid.

        I still think he overpaid by a factor of about 1.5.