An internal document seen by US media showed that Elon Musk currently estimates the value of Twitter at $20 billion, after the estimated value was $44 billion when he acquired the social network five months ago.
The internal letter to employees relates to profit sharing within the San Francisco-based conglomerate and to the share allocation of X Holdings, which oversees Twitter, since its acquisition at the end of October.
The stock distribution program estimates the value of the platform at $20 billion, which is close to the capital value of Snap, the parent company of Snapchat ($18.2 billion), or Pinterest ($18.7 billion), both of which are Two companies listed on the stock exchange.
AFP asked questions to the email address reserved for the press, but Twitter responded with an automatic response that included only an emoji in the form of a poop pile.
In the internal document, Elon Musk attributes the significant decline in the estimated value of the company to the financial difficulties faced by Twitter, which was close to bankruptcy at a certain stage, he said.
"Twitter was expected to lose $3 billion annually," Elon Musk wrote in a message posted on the platform on Saturday.
This figure, he says, is explained by a loss in turnover of $1.5 billion and debt maturities of an equivalent value.
"But now that advertisers are back, it looks like we're going to break even in the second quarter" of 2023, Twitter's chief and majority shareholder said.
Since taking over the platform, Elon Musk has reduced the group's workforce from 7,500 to fewer than 2,000 employees, by resorting to successive waves of layoffs.
In the internal document, Elon Musk says he sees a "difficult but clear path" toward valuation of the group by about $250 billion, without mentioning a deadline.
The man, who also heads Tesla and the SpaceX group, announced that Twitter would open a window every six months to allow employees of the social network to sell their shares, which are no longer listed.
In addition, parts of the source code for Twitter were published on GitHub, this platform for informatics developers announced Sunday to Agence France-Presse, confirming information published by the New York Times.
At the request of the social network, GitHub pulled these files from its website, but just viewing them, albeit for a short period, may have allowed hackers to identify vulnerabilities in the basic software on Twitter.