Filing: Fidelity marks down its Twitter stake, estimating that Twitter is now worth about 33% of the $44B that Elon Musk paid, down from 44% in November 2022
Twitter is now worth just one-third of what Elon Musk paid for the social-media platform, according to Fidelity …
Bloomberg
Context & Ripple Effects
Fidelity’s estimate provides a private-market check on the price implied by Musk’s buyout, following his initial 9.2% Twitter stake acquisition and subsequent increase in equity financing for the deal.
It is an early point in a continuing valuation-reset arc: Fidelity later marked X still lower, to roughly 28% of the purchase price, before a modest April 2024 uptick in its carrying value.
First-order effects
Fidelity reduces the carrying value of its Twitter position, estimating the company at about one-third of Musk’s $44 billion acquisition price.
The markdown establishes a substantially lower third-party reference point for the takeover’s equity investors than Fidelity’s prior November 2022 estimate.
Second-order effects
Other holders and prospective investors in the privately held company gain a clearer benchmark for assessing their own positions, though their valuations need not match Fidelity’s methodology.
A lower implied value makes future equity fundraising or investor liquidity more difficult unless the company can support a higher valuation with operating performance.
Third-order effects
Repeated investor mark adjustments can make private-platform valuations more visible between financing rounds, narrowing the gap between headline deal prices and portfolio-level assessments.
The episode points to greater scrutiny of leveraged, founder-led takeovers when public-market price discovery disappears; the durability of that shift depends on whether later financing validates or overturns these marks.
The trend: Private-market investors are increasingly using periodic portfolio marks to reassess high-profile platform takeovers after the public-market signal is gone.
Still too high. The only thing that will save this is if it becomes at meme stock: Twitter Worth Only Third of Elon Musk's Purchase: Fidelity - Bloomberg https://www.bloomberg.com/...
Kara is right. Zero credibility in his claim ad revenues are down *only 50%. It's chaos city which exhausted its paid subscription opportunity while becoming an unmanaged platform eroding any trust with advertisers — its only significant revenue stream. https://twitter.com/...
That seems like a particularly generous valuation, given that ~$15 billion is pretty close to what people were estimating Twitter's value to be pre-purchase, and the value can only have cratered since then due to loss of ad revenues and huge debt servicing costs. https://twitter.…
If you are planning to use the platform to attack the dollar, then any deal priced in future dollars is a good one; price is not relevant. https://twitter.com/...
Elon's been in control for less than a year and Twitter is already worth $15 billion - it's incredibly impressive, few people in history have built a $15 billion business this fast https://twitter.com/...