Twitter has decided to destroy itself by launching an IPO. This despite the fact that the last thing Twitter needs is to be on the stock market. So, of course, Twitter has decided to double down on its alleged value, and demand $1.8 billion from suckers, er, initial investors.
Twitter, of course, tweeted out the announcement. Here’s the whole thing, if you want to take a look:
By the way, this means that Twitter thinks it’s worth about $18 billion overall; the initial IPO is just for roughly 10% of the available stock in the company. I’ve gone into why, precisely, this IPO is a bad idea before; putting your company in the hands of idiots who don’t understand your business model and demand constantly improving results every quarter is generally a recipe for disaster. It’s really hard to see how Twitter is going to grow its advertiser base and demonstrate it’s an effective platform.
Also, $26 a share for a company that loses money as it grows is pretty much the dictionary definition of “terrible investment.” I’ve argued before that eventually social media websites will need to offer some form of subscription tier to survive. But Twitter, in this case, is demonstrating a particularly urgent need for this if it wants to stay afloat. Of course, this will never happen… so you might want to back up your Twitter account, just in case.