X, the social media platform formerly known as Twitter, has lost more than half of its value since the Tesla billionaire Elon Musk bought the company last year, reports have claimed.
Staff at the company, bought entirely by Musk in a $44 billion deal last October, have been offered restricted stock units at $45 a share, valuing the company at $19 billion.
Musk told employees in March that Twitter was an “inverse start-up” worth $20 billion. Last November, he took to the platform to joke, “How do you make a small fortune in social media? Start out with a large one.”
In July this year he renamed the platform X. He has said he wants to turn the platform into an “everything app”, incorporating payments and social networking.
This month, Musk started charging new users of X/Twitter in New Zealand and the Philippines, which is said to be a hub for spam traffic, an annual fee of $1 a in a bid to weed out bots and move towards a subscription model.
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Musk said: “Read for free, but $1/year to write. It’s the only way to fight bots without blocking real users. This won’t stop bots completely, but it will be 1000X harder to manipulate the platform.”
Musk, one of the founders of PayPal and chief executive of rocket maker SpaceX and Tesla, the electric car maker, is being sued by authorities in the United States to force him to testify over the Twitter takeover.
The Securities and Exchange Commission is investigating Musk over possible breaches of securities laws when he bought shares in the social media group. Musk has claimed that he has been “harassed” by the commission, which it denies.
Musk is due to make an appearance at the UK government’s summit on AI safety in Bletchley Park this week. The prime minister, Rishi Sunak, is to join him in a live interview on Musk’s platform on Thursday evening.
