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Few things are more unattended for risk capital investors than a round round. It is not just that raising money on an exhausted assessment leaves sponsors worse. In an industry full of great personalities, the rounds below, and even flat, also represent a contraction of status.
For an ambitious plutocrat like Elon Musk, such things are difficult to tolerate. According to reports, your social network X seeks to raise money. But from the outside, it is not obvious that the application once known as Twitter deserves a higher assessment than the $ 44 billion that Musk paid in 2022.
On the one hand, X won $ 1.2 billion of Ebitda adjusted in 2024, Bloomberg has reported, a little less than in 2021. If that grows in a third this year and is valued by investors to 15 times Ebitda, more or less where The alphabet, paint and target trade platforms, X will command only $ 24 billion.
Of course, X is a different beast today. On the one hand, according to reports, it has a participation in XAI, a crunchbase of artificial intelligence company at $ 50 billion. And for another, the numbers only have part of their history. These days, political influence is as much as metric and “daily active users”, and Musk, an advisor to the president of the United States, Donald Trump, have a lot.
For an idea of the halo of musk effect, just think that banks that financed their acquisition in 2022 Recently managed to sell large pieces of debt They had remained with a small discount of 97 cents per dollar.
Even if X exceeds the 2022 water brand, investors should apply a pinch of salt every time a technology company recovered its previous valuation peak. To start, $ 44 billion in the money of 2022 no longer are worth $ 44 billion. But even without the value of money, x should be worth much more.
At the time of purchase, for example, Twitter bankers considered That by 2024, based on an estimated multiple of 2025, the company would be worth up to $ 67 billion. It turns out that this is also more or less that it would be worth it if its value was raised in line with the Google matrix alphabet.
In general, the low rounds are now becoming less common as part of the VC agreements, Pitchbook data suggests. And it is possible to exaggerate the ignominy of an exhausted assessment. The platforms, then Facebook, resisted a round round in 2009. Its market capitalization is now more than 100 times what it was after that cut.
Still musk, which has suggested that x could be worth $ 1tn, It has something to demonstrate in any future capital breeding. And, therefore, it would be nonsense to bet on him. Power has usurped profitability as a engine of financial value. What the richest person in the world wants to have the habit of passing, whether logical or not.