Fidelity Slashes Value of Its Twitter Stake Once Again

Twitter is now worth a third of the $44 billion Elon Musk paid for it.

That’s according to a recent assessment by Fidelity, which has reportedly slashed the value of its own stake in the company — now listed as X Holdings — a number of times since November.

The assessment was initially reported by Bloomberg News, which says it is not clear how Fidelity calculated its new valuation. The latest reduction would place the total value of the social networking platform at around $15 billion, the Bloomberg report said.

PYMNTS has contacted Twitter for comment. The company responded with its standard reply.

Last month, Musk had placed Twitter’s value at $20 billion, but also said he envisions the company ballooning to a $250 billion payments company that could someday be “the biggest financial institution in the world,” a part of a super app called X that Musk wants to build.

As reported here soon after that pronouncement, Twitter has good reasons for wanting to diversify revenue streams, as it wants to become less dependent on advertising income, which has been steadily declining since Musk’s takeover.

Twitter has also attempted to recover lost advertising revenue by selling subscriptions, though Bloomberg says the company’s Twitter Blue program had attracted under 1% of monthly users as of the end of March.

“Platforms have the advantage of being able to add a range of services quickly or to bring new partners on board quickly to offer those services,” PYMNTS wrote. “And there’s the critical mass that comes with having, as Twitter reportedly does, around 375 million daily active users.”

But as noted in a separate report, a major obstacle facing Twitter/X’s plan is trust, as more than 50% of consumers count on their financial institutions most to provide a reliable super app.

“Americans, especially millennials, are highly interested in the benefits a super app may provide as a major step towards a more frictionless retail and payment experiences” PYMNTS wrote.

“The jury’s still out if it will be Microsoft, X or a still-unnamed organization to be first to the U.S. market. But if consumer enthusiasm is any hint, all signs point to the platform’s high probability of widespread adoption.”

Earlier this month, Musk named former NBCUniversal ad executive Linda Yaccarino as Twitter’s new chief executive.

Announcing the appointment on Twitter, Musk said Yaccarino would “focus primarily on business operations, while I focus on product design and new technology. Looking forward to working with Linda to transform this platform into X, the everything app.”