X has shed nearly $70 million in value per day since Elon Musk took over the social media company.
On Monday, Insider confirmed that employees of the company formerly known as Twitter were given stock grants that showed the social media company was worth about $19 billion. Fortune first reported on the valuation dropoff.
A spokesperson for X did not respond to a request for comment ahead of publication.
The new valuation represents a harsh 55% drop from the $44 billion, or $54.20 per share, that Musk paid about a year ago to take the company private.
Last November, Musk even joked about the exorbitant price he’d paid for X.
“How do you make a small fortune in social media?” he posted on X. “Start out with a large one.”
Here’s the napkin math on just how severe that valuation dropoff has been:
- $44 billion purchase price – $19 billion valuation one year later = a $25 billion annual drop in valuation
- Divide that by 52 weeks in a year = a valuation drop of $480 million per week
- Divide that by 7 days in a week = a valuation drop of $68.5 million per day
In the year since Musk took over, the company has faced a series of lawsuits, an exodus of users and advertisers, a series of technical difficulties, new competitors, and concerns about hate speech and misinformation on the site.
Despite the backlash, X CEO Linda Yaccarino and Musk have continued to strike a postive note. On the one-year anniversary of Musk’s takeover, Yaccarino wrote in a blog post that the “future of X is bright.”
Musk has said that he has worked to “save” the company from bankruptcy and wrote on the platform in February that it was “trending to breakeven.”
Meanwhile, Yaccarino has also said advertisers are returning to the platform. Though, Insider’s Lara O’Reilly reported last month that many of the biggest advertises in the world had also stopped purchasing ads on the site in recent months.
Over the past year, Musk has brought his “hardcore” leadership style to X. Just hours after he became the owner of the social media site, Musk began chopping heads, starting with Twitter’s then-CEO Parag Agrawal and months later completing a series of layoffs that cut the workforce in half.
In 12 months, Musk has changed X’s verification system and added a slew of new features in his quest to turn the company into a We-Chat-like “everything app.” He’s added the options to livestream, make phone calls using the app, and is attempting to build out a paid subscriber base on X. Most recently, Insider reported that Musk told staff at a companywide meeting last week that he wants X to be used as a dating app.
Notably, the billionaire did away with Twitter’s signature blue bird and changed the company name to X earlier this year — erasing more than 17 years of brand recognition, a move that some marketing experts called “completely irrational.”
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