Value of X has fallen 71% since purchase by Musk and name change from Twitter
Value of X has fallen 71% since purchase by Musk and name change from Twitter
Mutual fund Fidelity, which owns stake in social media platform, marks down value of its shares in disclosure obtained by Axios
The social media platform X has lost 71% of its value since it was bought by Elon Musk, according to the mutual fund Fidelity.
Fidelity, which owns a stake in X Holdings, said in a disclosure obtained by Axios that it had marked down the value of its shares by 71.5% since Musk’s purchase.
Musk acquired Twitter for $44bn in October 2022 and renamed the platform X in July 2023. Fidelity’s estimate would place the value of X at about $12.5bn.
The number of monthly users of X dropped by 15% in the first year since Musk’s takeover amid concerns over a rise in hate speech on the platform.
Takes real talent to lose 71% of a company in a short period of time.
Musk lost 71% of his "investment". Twitter was never worth that much. Before Musk started mucking with the stock, it was worth about $29 billion, and even that's still mostly stock and investor BS. Afaik, it was rarely, if ever, actually profitable. Just a capital fund poster child with hopes of monetizing user information.
How the hell was it even worth 44 billion? I struggle to understand how twitter was ever that important and never once found a need to use it myself. I always found it strange that governments and other public entities would use it, like a city making posts about traffic disruptions, or a police dept showing off the latest drug bust via hashtags and url shortening. Fucking strange world.
It never was. I argued with people on Hacker News at the time, and those idiots I was arguing with think that if someone is foolish enough to overpay for something, it's worth the amount they paid.
They literally believe that if someone pays a million dollars for a box of dirt, that box of dirt is worth a million dollars - no concept that it's only worth what you can sell it for.
I mean, what is your alternative definition of “worth” if it isn’t “What you can get for it”
Like you’re right that a valuation of something is not definitive to something’s worth, until somebody, anybody is willing to buy it for that much. After which, the worth could change.
So if I sell a box of first for $1 million, and somebody is willing to buy it, it is in fact worth $1 million. However once that fella buys it, it isn’t necessarily still worth $1 million anymore.
I argued with people on Hacker News at the time, and those idiots I was arguing with think that if someone is foolish enough to overpay for something, it's worth the amount they paid.
I remember when hackernews was pro-NFTs.
I swear real engineers don't use hackernews, and it's full of wannabe startup dudes and rise-and-grind folks.
Yeah, feels like a real misunderstanding of what one person is willing to pay vs what people are willing to pay.
It was never worth that. It was at most half that. But Elon Musk claimed he would buy it, but Twitter responded that it was NOT for sale. Then Musk offered double the value, and Twitter said....
OK! Thank you very much. 😀 🤪 😋 😜
Then Musk tried to get out of the deal, but he couldn't because there are laws about that stuff, something Musk is used to not having to care about, because his lawyers handle such issues for him.
He ended up having to pay, but he got some stupid people to help him finance it, making him potentially only lose half! He loaned half the money at a high interest rate in Twitter, so Twitter would have to pay it, leaving Twitter with a loan on top of already existing debt, that was to the amount of the total actual worth of Twitter sans the Musk offer. Why anyone would agree to loan Twitter money under such conditions is very strange, but the interest rate was high. Still there is no way a company already running at a deficit can service such a loan. But Musk is a shrewd conman, and he probably promised all sorts of mindbogglingly profitable businesses he would turn Twitter into.
Of course as the idiot he is, Musk then sued the Twitter lawyers for forcing him to buy at the price he had himself offered unconditionally, because why the hell not, lawyers are people too, and they need to earn a living.
So just to make sure everything was fine, he fired 80% of the people that worked at Twitter, closed one of the datacenters, and Tweeted some racist antisemitic shit, so he lost 70% of his advertisers.
And lately he has been severely butthurt that things aren't going well, literally saying to advertisers they can go fuck themselves, and claiming the earth will know the truth, which he intends to document in great detail. Yes he actually said those things!
So now the company has no internal value, and a bankruptcy will result in Zero money back to Musk. 22 Billion out the window for Musk, and another 22 Billion for those who helped him.
It wasn't. Musk was blowing hot air and offered a stupid-high share price. Twitter sued to force him to honor that price.
Lots and lots of people love parasocial relationships with celebrities, love throwing idiotic over simplified /but effective/ political slogans and newsbites around, and of course attempting to become 'thought leaders' or 'influencers' of some kind.
People then get addicted to the constant flow of 'content' and forget how to live without it.
Basically, it was perfect for the vapid and vain and uncritical people, and as it got more popular, network effect took over to the point well everyone is using it so we should too!
The company has rarely posted profits in its entire history.
It does not have any interesting technology or ideas as a service, app or website, it simply /had/ a large user base, which is basically now dwindling as Musk has proved to be the most incompetent manager of any large social media service that has ever existed.
Even more hilarious, a huge reason Musk bought Twitter was because he believed conspiracy theory type logically inconsistent right wing nonsense about how Twitter was suppressing right wing voices when empirically this could not have been farther from the truth, and then proved all his contradictory notions of how society should work are in fact nonsense with his insane decisions.
He basically acted like a 16 year old 4channer trying to moderate his personal private forum for an edgy video game community for the first time, but applied this kind of thinking to a platform of hundreds of millions of people.
And he is still acting this way, telling advertisers to go fuck themselves and then spinning a story in his head about how he can do no wrong and everyone is evil and out to get him, that the people of Earth will judge advertisers for destroying the one holy website that connects us all.
Paranoid megalomaniacal delusional sociopath.
Ah yes, that makes sense, because Musk bought it at twice what it was worth. /S
Meaning we start at 50%, so valuing it at 28.5% makes no sense, after Musk increased cost to run the company with a high interest loan that cost 1.5 Billion per year in interest. Money that didn't go into the company, but Musk used to finance the purchase. Then he drove away about 70% of advertisers, and the company is basically bankrupt from those two issues.
The real value is technically zero, because it has negative internal value, and it is running at huge deficits. But if you say there is hope as long as you live, and if you believe Musk is a financial magician, you may attribute some value from that. But again the value is technically as close to zero as you can get for a company that isn't actually bankrupt with vastly negative assets.It's value is for pushing propaganda there is a reason the Saudis gave musk money
That's only a value if someone wants to actually pay for it. The Saudis lend the money at a high interest rate.
Maybe it has value to them to just get it shut down? But why would that be worth 22 Billion plus a long term intensive engagement that threatens to hurt his other businesses too to Musk?
Musk is an idiot Nazi who wants a dictator to rule USA, because a dictator is inherently corrupt, so Musk can easier influence a dictator than a democracy. I sure hope USA doesn't give Musk that victory.
That estimate seems fairly high.
edit: Just to be clear, I'd be surprised it it is worth even $5Billion now.
Wait, but Joe Rogan and his chubs were saying how Musk was a genius businessman and will fix the boys problem and turn it into a free speech utopia. /s
Joe Rogan chubs..... Not something I ever want to think about. But to be fair, I'm sure a lot of his chuds have chubs for him.
At the end of the day I can only think that some idiot, who this life has given more wealth than they deserve, spent $44 billion on electricity. It really would be hilarious if I didn’t know where all the money could’ve gone to actually benefit humanity.
It really would be hilarious if I didn’t know where all the money could’ve gone to actually benefit humanity.
True. Societies really shouldn't allow billionaires at all as long as there are people who struggle to put food on the table.
And this year it will drop further!
Yeah but how good does Elon feel about himself now that he has a large forced audience?
It’s a great deal unless you’re one of his investors.
I was wondering what that large X close symbol was on imbedded Twitter posts was...
$12.5bn is still too high. When Musk bought it, maybe it was worth $8B, but since no one has figured out a way to make Twitter profitable, even that figure would be based mostly on equipment, branding, etc. Since Musk had bought it I say ita worth maybe $3B and will continue to drop.
There's no revenue and Musk has no ideas that hadn't already been tried.
From what I recall they did have some periods of profitability and weren't too far from it again. Then Musk saddled the company with debt payments that make profitability much more difficult (and then did all the dumb shit that destroyed revenue making profitability basically impossible).
They were close, but the company management felt they were not likely to have sustainable, predictable profits that would match what their investors wanted and they said that they really didn't have any ideas on how to bring in more revenue. When Musk offered them way too much money, it was a no brainer - take heaps of cash, walk away from a loser business, no more stress. That's why they were quick to sue him to force the deal through.
You have to consider that investors in Twitter wanted the company to become Apple, Netflix or Facebook, and that wasn't (isn't) going to happen.
It's dead, how has it retained even this much? I think he would have a hard time selling it for even a fraction of that valuation.
If you bought it you could theoretically undo the Musk bullshit and get the company back on track towards profitability. That's definitely worth something to someone.
Value
There is no new value because currently, it is not for sale.
There is no price for Twitter right now and there wont be again till it goes back up for sale.
Rules were different when it was publicly traded, but articles (and the analysis behind it) like this are clickbait.
The price per share at the time of the purchase was $54.20. This price had already been considered ridiculous at the time. Plenty of analysts had Twitters price at the 10-20$ range.
Just go through the thought exercise of what you think the value is now versus when it was trading at 30-40$ range before the buy out. Now, what do you think its worth?
For illustrative purposes: if I was able to buy shares of Twitter, right now? I would consider paying between 0.5$-4$ a share. I dont think the product or brand is dead, but under Musk its a walking corpse. If I could buy shares now, at that price, I would, but only under the speculation that Musk is out. I would hedge accordingly.
A price only exists when one is willing to pay it. Everything is an opinion until a transaction occurs.
My price for Twitter is 2-5% of the price Musk paid for it (which it DEFINITELY wasn't worth), and maybe 4-12% of fair market value in the months prior to the purchase. As a machine that turned on and made money, it did so prior to Musk taking over. The price has to factor in the damages done to brand, reputation, product, infrastructure, and what it will cost to rebuild those. Then of course there are the damages to company culture.
So yeah. Probably worth 1-5% of what it was, and only if you can basically guarantee Musk is out as CEO.
Money was never the goal. It was sabotage.
This was a hit and I'm betting it traces back to the Kremlin.
Bro, its not a secret. It was the Saudis.
Both, actually.
Grr that Elon, to hell with him
This is how the housing market works too! Buy a house for 500k, then loose a ton of value and sell for 50k. This way people can afford housing... just not you personally.
Down by 71% but still elon musk is one of the richest in the world and can buy 20 more twitter without batting an eye