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“I have a dream,” said Martin Luther King. Well, so does Elon Musk, and it centers on Twitter grabbing a $250 billion valuation.

As someone who’s known to be quite shrewd, Elon Musk is well-versed in the art of selling a dream. And when it comes to consoling disgruntled Twitter employees who know that they’ve been, umm, shafted, dreams can act as a critical release valve by shoving away growing disillusionment.

So if $44B went to $20B, the equity went from ~$31B to ~$7B, or a decline of close to 80% (assuming $20B is the EV). So @jack rolled his billion in and now has lost $800 million? And the prince has lost $1.5B? $TWTR

— Rob Schmied (@rschmied) March 27, 2023

As per an internal memo that leaked over the weekend, the stock awards of Twitter employees will now be based on a $20 billion valuation for the company, constituting a 54 percent discount to the $44 billion price tag that Elon Musk has had to pay for the social media platform.

However, in what was clearly meant as an attempt at consolation, Musk noted in the memo:

"I see a clear, but difficult, path to a >$250B valuation."

Should Twitter achieve this milestone, it will correspond to a 5.68x return on Musk’s total investment in Twitter.

Meanwhile, things appear to be improving at the global town square. A few days back, while participating in Morgan Stanley’s investor conference, Elon Musk said that Twitter’s non-debt expenditure for FY 2023 will compute at around $1.5 billion, constituting a marked reduction from an earlier estimate of $4.5 billion. The company was able to save substantial costs by aggressively laying off employees, curtailing the cloud services bill by 40 percent, and shutting down one data center. Twitter’s total expenses for the year are now expected to compute at around $3 billion, based on the $1.5 billion annual interest expense.

Nonetheless, such aggressive cost-cutting measures are likely unsustainable. Coupled with a marked slowdown in advertisement revenue, Twitter continues to face significant challenges. Even so, Elon Musk thinks that Twitter has “a shot” at becoming cash flow positive in the next quarter.

Meanwhile, as per a document filed with the U.S. District Court of the Northern District of California, “various excerpts” of Twitter’s source code have been leaked by a GitHub user who goes by the id FreeSpeechEnthusiast. The leak includes proprietary code that is used in Twitter’s internal tools.

Exactly

— Elon Musk (@elonmusk) March 18, 2023

Bear in mind that the social media platform is slated to open public access to its content recommendation algorithm on the 31st of March.