I'd guess that $19 billion is the value where if someone bought it and did their best to undo everything and get it back on track, that's how much it would be worth.
The problem with measuring value is you have to quantify what that $19 billion actually is. Like you could say it's the share price times the number of shares, except now twitter is privately owned we don't have a market share price anymore.
Indeed very interesting. It is a fundamental principle of finance: Investors seek to maximize utility, but this is under the axiom of complete rationality. And even if that condition is met (which I doubt), the utility function of money is not concave at all levels, for example leftmost of the graph, before the price of food. I think that after some point, utility becomes flat and Musk is way beyond that point. Additionally he seems to be a risk loving investor, not a risk averse.
I wonder if that’s a portion of why it’s devalued so much. I mean I know there’s a dozen or more other reasons but brand recognition could very well be one of them.
Can any trademark lawyer in the audience tell us how long before, if Musk lets the trademark lapse, some rando could come along and make a Twitter clone while literally just calling it "Twitter?"
Prince wanted people to call him Prince. He changed his name to that symbol to get out of a shitty contract with Warner Bros.
"Warner Bros took the name, trademarked it, and used it as the main marketing took to promote all of the music I wrote," Prince once said in a press release. "The company owns the name Prince and all related music marketed under Prince. I became merely a pawn used to produce more money for Warner Bros."