Steve

If I calculated correctly (by multiplying someone's per share book value estimate by a published number of shares), the Sick Bird had a "book value" of about $6 billion based on its last financial statements before the buyout.

Book value is, more or less, the total value of tangible assets, so it should represent roughly the value of a company if it is broken up in bankruptcy. It's a complicated thing to calculate.

Fidelity owns a small stake in Twitter and is required to periodically estimate the value of its stake as part of its obligations as a public corporation. Dividing its valuation of its stake by the percentage of the whole that its stake represents, the whole is worth about $15 billion.
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https://www.reuters.com/technology/fidelity-marks-down-value-twitter-stake-again-2023-05-30/

https://www.axios.com/2022/12/30/twitter-fidelity-valuation

#SickBird #Twitter #Fidelity

Fidelity marks down value of Twitter stake again

A Fidelity fund has marked down the value of its stake in Twitter for the third time since Elon Musk's $44 billion takeover of the social media platform in October, a monthly disclosure by the investment firm showed on Sunday.

Reuters
May 31, 2023 at 2:21amWeb
Show threadSteveMay 31, 2023

Fidelity's $15 billion figure is still 2.5 times the initial book value as of the buyout, and the book value has probably declined due to accumulating debts and assets sold since then.

But the figure is only meaningful if someone is fooling enough to buy Twitter now. As a smallish minority owner of Twitter, Fidelity couldn't force Space Gollum to sell even if a buyer appeared, unless it joined forces with other minority owners and went to court. And the value would only decline further while such a case went through the courts.

My guess is that Fidelity thinks Twitter will die, essentially worthless, and that they're just writing off their loss gradually, based on their estimate of how long it will take to go bankrupt.

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Show threadSteveMay 31, 2023

Bloomberg has an even lower estimate of the value of Twitter (or possibly just Space Gollum's stake in Twitter), only $8.8 billion.

https://financialpost.com/technology/twitter-value-elon-musk-purchase-price-fidelity

#FinancialPost #Bloomberg

Personally, I think it will end up close to worthless when it gets to bankruptcy court. By then its value to any likely buyer will be smaller than its debt, which appears to be around $13 billion. My guess is that it will be bought by another social media company, and revived in a greatly diminished form.

Space Gollum will blame the CEO he hired to oversee the collapse of Twitter, and its lenders and minority owners will be suing him for negligent mismanagement.

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Twitter now worth just 33% of Elon Musk’s purchase price, Fidelity says

Titter is now worth just one-third of what Elon Musk paid for the social-media platform, according to Fidelity, a company shareholder. Read on

Financial Post