Elon Musk puts Twitter's value at just $20 billion, at half of his purchase price

Elon Musk has put the current value of Twitter at $20 billion, less than half the $44 billion he paid for the social media platform just five months ago, according to an internal email seen by American news media.

The email to employees dealt with a new stock compensation program in the San Francisco-based company and the attribution to employees of stock in X Holdings, Twitter's umbrella company since Musk purchased it in late October.

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

An emailed query from AFP sent to Twitter's communications department generated an automatic response in the form of a poop emoji.

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