Over the weekend, Elon Musk told Twitter employees via corporate email that the social media platform’s value had fallen significantly since he acquired it for $44 billion.
The email was verified by The New York Times, which reported that a “new stock-based compensation program” had been sent to employees. In the same email, Musk warned employees that Twitter was currently in a “precarious financial position” and even justified the “radical changes” the company was making, including cost cuts and massive layoffs, which it said would be necessary to avert and prevent bankruptcy. Streamline processes. Despite all this, he wrote: “Twitter is changing fast.” However, since Musk took over, Twitter’s value had rapidly fallen to less than 50% of what it was when he acquired it.
The same email notes that the new stock compensation program will result in Twitter employees receiving shares in X Corporation, the holding company Musk used to buy the company. Although the award will be worth less than $20 billion, Musk said he believes Twitter will one day be worth $250 billion. Twitter allows employees to sell shares every six months.
The assessment comes when the NYT also reported that some of the Twitter code was leaking online. Specifically, it is part of the underlying computer code that runs social networks. The news was confirmed by legal filings as the company struggles to mitigate technical issues in this vast and rare intellectual property exposure.
Last weekend, Twitter removed the leaked code last weekend by filing a copyright infringement notice on GitHub. GitHub is an online collaboration platform for software developers to publish code. GitHub complied, but it’s unclear how long the code was leaked before Twitter became aware of it. Twitter has since launched an investigation to see who posted the code, but with 75% of former employees having been fired or laid off, it’s difficult to say. The leaked code shows concern for Twitter as it appears they are vulnerable. The leak comes after Musk recently promised to publish Twitter’s code. The billionaire wrote, “Twitter will open source all code used to recommend Tweets by March 31st.” The person who leaked the code appears to be using “FreeSpeechEnthusiast” on GitHub.
