Twitter’s value keeps going down despite Elon Musk’s efforts to make the social media platform profitable. Following its recent evaluation resulting in a markdown of the value of its equity stake in Twitter, Fidelity Investment Fund said the company is now worth just one-third of the $44 billion Musk paid for its acquisition.
Fidelity, which helped Musk to finance his Twitter acquisition, slashed its stakes on Twitter by 56% in December 2022. The investor had valued the stake as being worth $8.63 million in November but has since pared that back twice, most recently valuing it at $6.55 million, per Investopedia. Only 0.16% of Fidelity Blue Chip Growth Fund’s assets in April were in X Holdings.
In March, Musk said in an email to employees – addressing issues of Twitter stock compensation program and the attribution to employees of stock in X Holdings, that Twitter’s value was down to $20 billion.
It’s not clear how Fidelity arrived at its new valuation, which is quite lower than where Musk has placed the social media company last two months. The valuation puts Twitter’s worth at about $8.8 billion, thereby taking about $850 million from Musk’s $187 billion net worth, according to Bloomberg estimates.
Musk put in more than $25 billion to acquire an estimated 79% stake in Twitter last year.
Musk has struggled in his efforts to revamp and diversify Twitter revenue with moves such as monetizing the verification mark. The social media platform has been confronted with many challenges, including a mass exodus of advertisers, following Musk’s takeover late last year.
Twitter has an enormous $13 billion debt to service with meager revenue. The exodus of advertisers, who left due to disagreement with Musk on content moderation, resulted in a 50% revenue decline.
Musk said in March that the company is gradually recovering as advertisers return.
But the advertisers’ return has not been as expected as controversy continues to trail how the platform is being run. Some of the platform’s top users have quit while others are threatening to do so if Musk does not address some of their concerns ranging from hate to cyberbullying.
Musk’s attempt to revive Twitter’s revenue through Twitter Blue subscriptions has also failed to take off great. Many Twitter users whose legacy verifications were removed have refused to pay for subscriptions. At the end of March, less than 1% of Twitter’s monthly users had signed up to Twitter Blue.
Musk recently announced the appointment of Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s new CEO, but said she will focus primarily on business operations, while he focuses on product design and new technology.
There was not much excitement about the appointment of Yaccarino, a former NBCUniversal advertising executive. Apart from Tesla shareholders, who believe the appointment of Yaccarino will shift Musk’s focus on the electric vehicle company, many others believe that the new CEO will change little or nothing from the way Musk is currently running Twitter.
We will have to wait to see if Yaccarino has what it takes to win the confidence of users and pull the advertisers back. Twitter relies on advertisements for more than 90% of its revenue.
