Elon Musk’s investment in Twitter is almost entirely gone

Twitter has lost $29 billion in valuation since it was acquired late last year by technology mogul Elon Musk, the investment firm Fidelity said in a new report this week.

Tech mogul Elon Musk’s $25 billion investment in Twitter is almost entirely gone as the social media website has struggled to gain financial footing in the months since he acquired it in a private sale, according to a new report.

This week, investment firm Fidelity said Twitter is valued at around $15 billion, about one-third of the $44 billion Musk and his co-investors paid to acquire the social media platform in late October.

Of that $44 billion, Musk himself put up $25 billion in debt financing to acquire the platform. Financial news outlet Bloomberg said that investment is now worth around $8.8 billion.

Musk owns 79 percent of Twitter and is the platform’s chief executive officer, a role he intends to abdicate soon after hiring NBC advertising chief Linda Yaccarino to serve as the company’s new CEO.

Since acquiring Twitter, Musk has made several business decisions that have drawn criticism and scrutiny from every corner of the financial and legislative world.

Immediately after closing the deal, Musk dissolved Twitter’s board of directors and fired several top executives, some of whom are now suing the company over unpaid legal bills.

Musk also laid off hundreds of engineers who served in critical support roles that kept the platform running. Since the layoffs, Twitter has been prone to glitches and outages that have frustrated users and raised questions over Musk’s ability to operate the service on his own.

Recently, a bug caused once-private Twitter postings to be publicly accessible; the posts were made through a feature called Twitter Circles, which was intended to give users the ability to limit posts to a specific audience.

Once favored by local and national journalists for its ability to deliver real-time updates to millions of users, Twitter has become aggressively combative toward members of the press in the months since Musk acquired the platform.

Musk banned several reporters who tweeted information about an account that followed his private jet and modified an email account used by journalists to communicate with the company so it automatically responded to any messages with a poop emoji.

Today, around 1,500 workers are still employed at Twitter — far fewer than the 7,500-strong workforce Musk inherited last year.

Those who remain have accused Twitter of failing to pay them on time. The landlords that own Twitter’s San Francisco headquarters have made similar complaints. 

Last month, Musk told the BBC that running Twitter was “quite painful,” but claimed the site was “breaking even” amid an uptick in advertising.

“We could be profitable, or to be more precise, cash flow positive this quarter if things keep going well,” Musk said.

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Matthew Keys

Matthew Keys is an award-winning freelance journalist who covers the intersection of media, technology and journalism. He is the publisher of TheDesk.net and a contributor to KnowTechie, StreamTV Insider (formerly Fierce Video) and Digital Content Next. Matthew is based in Northern California.