Elon Musk’s revaluation of Twitter sounds like a sober admission of failure. A $20bn value pegged to new employee stock awards is less than half the amount he paid for the company. In reality, it is wildly optimistic. Value Twitter on the same metric as social media peer Snap and the equity is worth nothing.

When Musk closed his $44bn deal in late October, driven by what he called a desire to champion free speech, the digital advertising sector had already crashed. Between the date he offered to buy Twitter and the deal’s completion, Snap’s share price fell 65 per cent. Meta’s was down 55 per cent. Without Musk’s bid to bolster it, Twitter’s market value would probably also have halved.

Since then, ructions have intensified. While Meta’s revenue fell 1 per cent last year and Snap recorded a 12 per cent gain, Twitter’s is reported to have declined 40 per cent. The workforce is unhappy following large-scale job cuts. Parts of the crucial source code have been posted on GitHub, a hosting website for developers.