Elon Musk’s social media platform, X (previously Twitter), is worth lower than half of what the tech billionaire purchased it for in October final yr, an inner memo has reportedly revealed.
According to an Oct. 30 report from Bloomberg, an inner memo and sources aware of the matter stated that restricted inventory items not too long ago paid to staff of the firm have been valued at $45 a share, which places the firm’s worth at round $19 billion — lower than half of the $44 billion that Musk paid for the firm on Oct. 27, 2022.
Musk has made a sequence of controversial strikes since taking on the platform, including rebranding it to X, changing many of its content rules and laying off approximately 80% of the firm’s workforce.
Musk’s drastic modifications, alongside together with his outspoken presence on the platform, additionally seem to have made his firm much less well-liked with advertisers, with Bloomberg estimating that X has now misplaced at the least half of its whole promoting income.
Meanwhile, the vital drop in income has made the servicing of Musk’s debt worrisome for the agency as a complete. As of the time of publication, X reportedly owes round $1.2 billion in curiosity funds on its roughly $13 billion in whole debt.
Musk has made it clear that he desires to rely extra closely on paid consumer subscriptions, however as of proper now, lower than 1% of the platform’s whole consumer base has decided to fork over cash for a premium subscription, which equates to lower than $120 million in annual income.
Cointelegraph contacted X for remark however didn’t obtain a direct response.
Related: Elon Musk says posts busted by Community Notes won’t earn revenue share
On the different hand, some have seen advantages from Musk’s tenure at the firm.
One of the well-liked additions to the platform below Musk has been paying individual creators for their engagement by manner of revenue-sharing funds.
Recently, Musk introduced that any posts corrected by the Community Notes function would turn into “ineligible for revenue share” — a transfer that seeks to prioritize correct info over purely viral and probably inaccurate content material.
Making a slight change to creator monetization:
Any posts which might be corrected by @CommunityNotes turn into ineligible for income share.
The concept is to maximise the incentive for accuracy over sensationalism.
— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) October 29, 2023
Meanwhile, Musk has repeated on quite a few events that he means to turn X into an “everything app” — largely impressed by the tremendous apps well-liked in Asia similar to WeChat, which might see the social media platform broaden to incorporate a variety of monetary companies, video calls and different life-style use circumstances.
There are additionally hopes that X will integrate cryptocurrency not directly in the future.
Magazine: Ethereum restaking — Blockchain innovation or dangerous house of cards?