According to an internal email seen by US media, Elon Musk has put Twitter's current value at 20 billion US dollars, less than half of the 44 billion he paid for the social media platform just five months ago.

The email to employees refers to a new stock compensation program at the San Francisco-based company and to employees being allocated stock in X Holdings, Twitter's umbrella company since Musk bought it in late October.

The compensation plan values the platform at $20 billion, slightly more than the value of Snap ($18.2 billion), Snapchat's parent company, or social network and creativity website Pinterest ($18.7 billion). , which, unlike Twitter, are publicly traded.

A query emailed by AFP to Twitter's communications department generated an automated response in the form of an emoji.

In the internal email, Musk described the brutal shrinking of Twitter's value. He says the platform faced such severe financial difficulties that at one point it was on the verge of bankruptcy.

"The trend was for Twitter to lose about $ 3 billion a year," Musk said in a statement posted on the platform.

He cited a drop in revenue of $ 1.5bn a year and a debt service burden of the same amount - leaving it with "only 4 months of cash".

Musk, who is the majority owner of Twitter shares, added simply: "Extremely dire situation."

He then said that as advertisers - many of whom left the platform after the mercantile billionaire bought it - were now starting to return, "it looks like we will break even" in the second quarter of the year.

Since taking control, Musk has sharply cut the group's payroll from 7,500 to fewer than 2,000 employees.

Musk, who is also the CEO of Tesla Inc. and aerospace group SpaceX, said Twitter will allow the social network's employees to cash out shares every six months.

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