Twitter CEO Elon Musk puts current value of company at $20 billion, less than half of what he paid

Less than six months after buying Twitter for $44 billion, Elon Musk has put the current value of the company at $20 billion, said the news agency AFP. The report is on the basis of an internal email seen by American news media. The email, sent to employees, dealt with a new stock compensation program in the San Francisco-based company. 

The compensation plan has valued the social media platform at $20 billion. This is slightly more than that of Snap ($18.2 billion), the parent company of Snapchat and Pinterest ($18.7 billion). Unlike Twitter, they both are publicly traded.

In the internal email, the company's CEO describes the brutal contraction in Twitter's value. According to Musk, Twitter faced grave financial difficulties and it was even on the verge of bankruptcy at one point in time.

"Twitter was trending to lose $3B/year," Musk said in a message posted Saturday on the platform.

He cited a revenue drop of $1.5 billion a year and a debt-servicing burden of the same amount -- leaving it with "only 4 months of money."

Meanwhile, Twitter has admitted that parts of its source code were leaked online on GitHub, and has sent a copyright infringement notice to the open-source coding collaboration platform, the media reported.

In a court filing, Twitter also asked the US District Court for the Northern District of California to order GitHub to identify the person who shared the code and any other individuals who downloaded it, reports The New York Times.

GitHub has taken down the code and it was unclear how long the leaked source code was posted online.

The exposed source code adds to the challenges facing Musk`s Twitter.

"Technology companies often view such code as a closely held secret and do not share it for fear that it could give competitors an unfair advantage or reveal security vulnerabilities," the report mentioned.

Musk did not comment about Twitter`s leaked code.

This month, the Twitter CEO announced the micro-blogging platform will open source all code used for recommending tweets on March 31.

Musk tweeted: "Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31."

With agency inputs