X's Valuation Drops 55% From $44 Billion To $19 Billion In Just One Year Under Elon Musk

It's been more than a year since the world¡¯s richest person, Elon Musk, bought Twitter for a mammoth $44 billion. Since then, the social media platform has undergone a string of major changes, from its name and logo to mass layoffs, revenue struggles, and much more.

And amidst all that, X (formerly Twitter) has lost a big chunk of its valuation too.

When Did Elon Musk Buy Twitter?

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Elon Musk completed the $44 billion deal to buy Twitter (now X) on October 27, 2022. He had paid $54.20 a share to take the company private in 2022.

How Much Value Has X Lost?

Just about a year after Elon Musk bought Twitter for $44 billion, the company has already lost more than 50% of its valuation. X has internally valued itself at $19 billion as of Monday, October 30th, as per multiple news reports.

This $19 billion valuation signals a 55% drop from what Elon Musk paid for the company last October. The company has handed out stock grants to employees that showed X was worth about $19 billion, according to the New York Times, citing internal documents.

This latest valuation of $19 billion is a bit higher than the $16.9 billion that Fidelity¡ªwhich has a small stake in X¡ªvalued the company at in late August.

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Also Read: From Mass Layoffs To Merger-What Went Wrong At Twitter Under Elon Musk

What Elon Musk Has Said About Twitter's Valuation

Ever since he purchased Twitter, Musk has repeatedly said that he overpaid for it. Even before the $44 billion acquisition was finalised, Musk said in an October 2022 Tesla earnings call that he was ¡°obviously overpaying for Twitter right now,¡± though he believed the company¡¯s long-term potential was ¡°an order of magnitude greater than its current value¡±, as per a Forbes report.

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The world's richest person had also tried to call off an agreement to buy Twitter at $54.20 a share last year, citing concerns about the number of fake accounts, but Twitter sued him and asked a judge to force him to follow through, and he eventually closed the deal in October 2022. In April, during an interview with conservative media personality Tucker Carlson, he admitted the purchase was not currently ¡°financially smart¡± and said the company was worth about half of what he paid for it.

In a March internal memo that was leaked, Musk suggested that Twitter was worth less than $20 billion, which has just turned out to be so close to its value at present ($19 billion).

Why Has X's Value Dropped Dramatically?

Since acquiring and taking control of Twitter last year, Elon Musk has taken multiple big decisions, including renaming the platform X (which is expected to have impacted its brand value to a great extent), loosening the site¡¯s content moderation rules, charging users to get verification check marks, and temporarily limiting the number of posts a user can view or the number of direct messages a user can send. Consequentially, in September this year, Musk revealed that ad revenue was down 60% since his acquisition.

Besides all this, X has also been affected by a number of legal challenges under Musk, both as plaintiff and defendant, as per a Forbes report. X has faced lawsuits over allegations that it has refused to pay its employees promised severance, that it¡¯s refused to pay its rent and office fees, and that it breached a contract it made with a regional jet company. As a plaintiff, X has sued the nonprofit Centre for Countering Digital Hate, claiming that the organisation violated X¡¯s terms of service by collecting data for an analysis it did into hate speech on X.

Also Read: Elon Musk Biography Reveals he Bought Twitter Out Of Boredom

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