Musk awarded all the X employees he didn’t fire equity in the company, saying it was valued at $19 billion, or $45 a share. That’s a 55 per cent drop in value from when Musk bought it.

Analysts think the numbers might be overly optimistic too. The mutual fund company Fidelity — which contributed over $300 million to Musk’s Twitter takeover revealed it thinks the company is worth 65 per cent less than it was last year.

The new valuation is a billion less than the $20 billion Musk said he thought Twitter was worth in an internal email in March.

For those not in the know, Musk agreed to buy Twitter for $44 billion last April. By July 2022, Twitter’s stock price had fallen from the $54.20 a share Musk had agreed to pay to about $34 a share.

Musk tried to back out of the deal, citing concerns about spam accounts; Twitter then sued and in October 2022, Musk purchased the company at the original price agreed upon.  He then proceeded to gut the company like a fish, refuse to pay rent, and open the channel up to previously banned deplorables who he claimed no longer had a voice.

This led to a situation where the company didn’t have the staff to handle security or hardware faults, and which lost advertisers who didn’t want to be associated with neo-nazis. There was an exodus of customers who did not want to stick around to be threatened by brown-shirts and flat earthers.

It turns out that sane people don't really like listening to extreme views shouted at them by people who can't turn off the caps lock. Who would have thunk it?