Ever since Elon Musk acquired Twitter for $44 billion last year, it’s been a widely agreed upon stance that he greatly overpaid for the social media platform.
However, the amount in which he overpaid seems to be widening post-acquisition.
According to Fidelity, Twitter is now worth around 33 percent what the billionaire originally paid for it. That puts Twitter’s value at roughly $15 billion. The number comes from the investment firm’s own valuation of its own stake in Musk’s Twitter, which Fidelity helped finance.
Twitter’s valuation from Fidelity follows a pattern since Musk took over in October of last year. Fidelity has consistently downgraded its own holdings in the company, knocking the value of its stake by 56 percent just a month after the acquisition closed. By the end of February, Fidelity further downgraded its stake by more than 63 percent before knocking it down by a full two-thirds this month.
Despite Musk’s recent claims about Twitter soon breaking even or even becoming profitable, the company’s outlook has not been particularly good. Twitter lost around half of its biggest advertisers when Musk took over. Many still had not returned by earlier this year and those who had continued to advertise on the platform were spending a significant amount less.
Musk turned to subscription-based revenue models like Twitter Blue and Subscriptions to make up for those losses, but even those have proven to be unsuccessful.
Twitter Blue is an $8 per month subscription service that gives premium features, such as longer tweets and videos as well as the once-coveted blue checkmark badge, to paying users. Based on the latest data from researcher Travis Brown, far less than 1 percent of Twitter’s entire monthly active user base has subscribed to Twitter Blue.
Twitter’s other subscription product, known as Subscriptions, allows users to pay a monthly fee directly to a specific Twitter user in order to access exclusive paywalled tweets and other content. Musk himself leaked that he had around 25,000 subscribers last month or only 0.018 percent of the roughly 136.4 million followers he had at the time.
Musk has since announced that Linda Yaccarino, a former ad executive with NBCUniversal, would be coming on board to replace Musk as CEO. This move was ostensibly made to help turn the tide regarding Twitter’s issues with advertisers. However, Musk has made it clear that he will stay on board at Twitter regardless. It will be interesting to see what direction Twitter’s valuation moves in the coming months.
