Elon Musk's X is down for users globally in its latest outage

Fidelity marks down X valuation by 71.5%

by with No Comment Tech

Elon Musk's X is down for users globally in its latest outage

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Mutual fund company Fidelity has marked down its investment in X holdings — the parent company of X (formerly Twitter) owned by Elon Musk — by 71.5% from the original valuation of shares, according to a new disclosure.

Fidelity spent $19.2 million to acquire a stake in X back in October 2022. The fund manager made a valuation cut of 65% in October 2023. And now in the November 2023 disclosure, the firm has made a further cut in X’s valuation. Notably, Fidelity’s disclosures are one month behind the current date.

X has gone through quite a lot of changes in the past year, including getting a new CEO in former NBCU exec Linda Yaccarino. During an interview at the Code Conference in September 2023, Yaccarino claimed that the company would turn profitable in 2024.

The biggest challenge for the company is to convince advertisers to spend money on the platform. A lot of prominent advertisers — including Apple, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, IBM, Paramount Global, Lionsgate and the European Commission — pulled out from the platform after Musk called an antisemitic conspiracy theory the “actual truth.”

Later in the month, at the DealBook Conference, he told advertisers to go fuck themselves.

“What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company,” Musk continued. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.”

In December, Financial Times reported that X will look to appease small and medium businesses to spend ad money on the platform. X contested The New York Times’ claim that the platform will lose $75 million because of an advertiser boycott and told FT that the estimated drop will be around $10-12 million.

“Small and medium businesses are a very significant engine that we have definitely underplayed for a long time “It [was] always part of the plan — now we will go even further with it,” X told the publication.

Musk has also made controversial decisions to restore accounts of previously banned users such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Kanye West, former U.S. President Donald Trump, far-right influencer Andrew Tate and right-wing academic Jordan Peterson.

Elon Musk's X is down for users globally in its latest outage

Fidelity marks down X valuation by 71.5%

by with No Comment Tech

Elon Musk's X is down for users globally in its latest outage

Image Credits: TechCrunch

Mutual fund company Fidelity has marked down its investment in X holdings — the parent company of X (formerly Twitter) owned by Elon Musk — by 71.5% from the original valuation of shares, according to a new disclosure.

Fidelity spent $19.2 million to acquire a stake in X back in October 2022. The fund manager made a valuation cut of 65% in October 2023. And now in the November 2023 disclosure, the firm has made a further cut in X’s valuation. Notably, Fidelity’s disclosures are one month behind the current date.

X has gone through quite a lot of changes in the past year, including getting a new CEO in former NBCU exec Linda Yaccarino. During an interview at the Code Conference in September 2023, Yaccarino claimed that the company would turn profitable in 2024.

The biggest challenge for the company is to convince advertisers to spend money on the platform. A lot of prominent advertisers — including Apple, Comcast/NBCUniversal, Disney, Warner Bros. Discovery, IBM, Paramount Global, Lionsgate and the European Commission — pulled out from the platform after Musk called an antisemitic conspiracy theory the “actual truth.”

Later in the month, at the DealBook Conference, he told advertisers to go fuck themselves.

“What this advertising boycott is going to do is kill the company,” Musk continued. “And the whole world will know that those advertisers killed the company, and we will document it in great detail.”

In December, Financial Times reported that X will look to appease small and medium businesses to spend ad money on the platform. X contested The New York Times’ claim that the platform will lose $75 million because of an advertiser boycott and told FT that the estimated drop will be around $10-12 million.

“Small and medium businesses are a very significant engine that we have definitely underplayed for a long time “It [was] always part of the plan — now we will go even further with it,” X told the publication.

Musk has also made controversial decisions to restore accounts of previously banned users such as conspiracy theorist Alex Jones, Kanye West, former U.S. President Donald Trump, far-right influencer Andrew Tate and right-wing academic Jordan Peterson.

Meesho GMV tops $5B; app grows faster than Flipkart, Amazon India

Fidelity cuts Meta-backed Meesho valuation to $3.5B

by with No Comment Tech

Meesho GMV tops $5B; app grows faster than Flipkart, Amazon India

Image Credits: Meesho

Fidelity has cut the value of its holding in Meesho by 33.6% since the original investment, giving the Indian social commerce startup a valuation of $3.25 billion. Adjusted for outstanding shares, Meesho said its valuation stands at $3.5 billion.

The U.S. asset manager valued its holding in Meesho at $27.8 million at December’s end, down from the $41.9 million that it invested in the second half of 2022 through a specific mutual fund unit. Fidelity made the disclosure about the markdown in its monthly disclosure on Monday afternoon.

Fidelity had marked down the valuation of Meesho to $4.1 billion at the end of October. The startup was valued at $4.9 billion in its previous funding. The valuation adjustment follows a secondary sale transaction late last year when early backer Venture Highway sold some of its equity in Meesho to WestBridge Capital, TechCrunch first reported. That sale valued Meesho at $3.5 billion, a factor that may have contributed to Fidelity’s assessment.

In a statement to TechCrunch, a Meesho spokesperson said: “Funds attribute value to their portfolio investments, considering various factors such as the valuation of comparable companies. Based on Fidelity filings, the number of shares held and the current number of total outstanding fully diluted shares, the valuation is assessed at $3.5 billion. The increase in the number of outstanding shares, notably due to the ESOP pool expansion, could have contributed to this valuation shift.”

At the same time, Fidelity has slightly marked up the value of its holding in Reddit, Gupshup and X, according to the monthly disclosure. All of these startups remain far below their original investment dollars.

Meesho — which counts Meta, Peak XV, Prosus Ventures, B Capital, and SoftBank among its backers — operates a social commerce startup and is among the fastest growing e-commerce startups in the country. Its current GMV run rate is over $5 billion, AllianceBernstein reported earlier this month. It’s also looking to expand into new areas — planning to build a financial services platform and scale its grocery delivery business, Indian daily Economic Times reported Tuesday.

Over 50% of Meesho’s sales come from Tier 2 and below cities, allowing it to effectively target a demographic largely overlooked by Flipkart and Amazon so far. Meesho’s strategic prioritization of small towns and focus on mass-market, value-conscious customer base is paying dividends, according to AllianceBernstein.