from great job everyone! department
For months, Elon Musk promised Twitter’s rapidly shrinking workforce that he would give them stock grants. He promised that those grants would come on March 24th, and I can tell you that when regular business hours ended on the 24th with no details, some of the remaining employees were furious. However, that was just Musk being late, in typical fashion. An email was sent to Twitter 20 employees late at night, which also included details of the grants.
Details as reported by Wall St. at the Journal, is that employees will receive grants over four years with a 6-month vest (ie, nothing for the first six months, so try not to piss him off. or he’ll fire you and you’ll get nothing) and regular opportunities for cash out.
But the key part is that Musk says the capital grants will come at a company valuation of $20 billion. Remember, just five months ago he paid $44 billion for it, so he admits to burning through $24 billion in five months, more or less. That’s impressive.
Elon Musk said Twitter Inc. employees will receive stock awards based on a roughly $20 billion valuation, less than half of the $44 billion price tag he bought the company for last year, according to The Wall Street Journal. in an email reviewed by
A master of spin, hype and marketing, Musk concocted a story about how Twitter could be worth $250 billion in a few years.
In a note to staff, Mr Musk said he was optimistic about the future of the social media company. “I see a clear but difficult path to a valuation of more than $250 billion,” meaning the shares on offer now are worth 10 times more, he said.
I mean, right now, all these valuations are in Musk’s head. The only way you know for sure is when the stock is either publicly available or there is some outside investment that values the company. So these numbers are somehow meaningless. A company may be worth $10 billion or $1 billion or $50 billion.
But that Musk actually admits it He thinks that an estimate of about $20 billion is a pretty big admission of failure. He took an asset he (perhaps foolishly) valued at $44 billion and knocked down more than half the value. And given that he tends to overestimate his own creations, he almost certainly overestimates the value. Great work!
Also, I’m curious how other shareholders feel about all of this. Now they all have more money than they could ever use, so maybe they don’t care one bit, but I remember hearing from some people how Musk had the “Midas touch” and they were sure that he would take. their $500 million to $2 billion investment and turn it into much more. And here he, just five months later, admitted that he basically burned that money.
As for the claim that he will get it to a valuation of up to $250 billion, anything is possible. But to date, given that it’s driven away a lot of advertisers, it’s made the site a lot more fragile, it’s made it significantly less receptive to inviting the most abusive users back, and flooding everyone’s feed with about 5x more ads than before Twitter Blue Program , which very few people seem to be interested in… it’s reasonable to wonder how he thought the site would be valued at $250 billion off the top of his head.
Filed Under: Elon Musk, stock grants, valuation
Companies: twitter