Fidelity, which helped finance $44 billion Twitter takeover slashes Twitter's value by 56%

Eh, no one really knows what Twitter is worth and this is headline clickbait. Elon has a vision for Twitter that is fundamentally different than the company he purchased. Traditional valuation methods aren’t good at evaluating this sort of thing.

Corruption to evade taxes

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Basically taking a year end tax loss to offset any gains

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How exactly do they take a tax loss unless they realized the losses?

Regardless, if the value was based on the $54.20 per share sales price, then that puts the per share price at about $23.78 per share, about a 45.3% decrease for the year. That's pretty comparable to the 42.6% Global X Social Media ETF (SOCL) and quite a bit better than a number of other large social media stocks like META and SNAP.

So considering the debt and its annual servicing that came with the sale, for a company that struggles to make much of a profit and grow that profit, with a lot of uncertainty surrounding it (someone else taking over for Elon, push for more of a subscription model instead of an ad model, etc.), I think that's a pretty favorable valuation. I mean that still puts it at about a TTM PE ratio (from last public filings) of over about 100.

This.

This is exactly the reason you take a company private to restructure, you can’t do the dirty work in a public market. Trying to assign a value mid restructure is stilly.

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This. This is exactly the reason you take a company private to restructure, you can’t do the dirty work in a public market. Trying to assign a value mid restructure is stilly.

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This is true, but I also think people are misinterpreting what this valuation reflects and some timing quirks due to the period of time for the sale to become final and if being finalized near the end of the year.

Specifically this seems more reflective of a mark-to-market valuation, and a valuation that would have likely been similar 6 months ago. It just happened that by the time Elon took over, it was months later, and I’m assuming Fidelity marked it down so quickly because it was nearing the end of the year (could be wrong).

So altogether it looks like the sudden and dramatic markdown was all a result of Elon’s month as CEO, but I think it actually has little to do with that, and maybe nothing at all.

Yet user activity and accounts are at an all time high.

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Eh, no one really knows what Twitter is worth and this is headline clickbait. Elon has a vision for Twitter that is fundamentally different than the company he purchased. Traditional valuation methods aren’t good at evaluating this sort of thing.

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At a certain point, I would just trust the guy who is likely to be the world's first trillionaire if he lives long enough.