By Aaron Miler-
Elon Musk on Friday filed a lawsuit seeking a subpoena to force GitHub to reveal who posted parts of the code online.
GitHub, a site for computer programmers to share ideas and collaborate on projects, has since taken the code segments down. Source code is the ‘DNA’ of a website: the programming behind it, which shows how it operates. It is considered intellectual property.
It was posted by an unknown source using the name ‘FreeSpeechEnthusiast’ – a seeming reference to Musk himself, who declared that he was a ‘free speech absolutist’.
Analysts believe that the code could have been posted online by a disgruntled former employee.
Calculations based o the leaked memo reveals that twitter is worth less than half of what Elon Musk paid for it six months ago having lost more than $20bn (£16.4bn) in value, according to calculations based on a leaked memo from the billionaire.
Musk suggested in the memo to the social media company’s staff that it is now valued at less than $20bn. This compares with the $44bn he paid for it in October 2022.
The devaluation is believed to be the result of the negative influence of Musk’s take over. Several large advertisers have left the platform and a major source of funds for Musk’s purchase of the company, the investment firm Fidelity, has written down the value of its stake by 56%.
Twitter’s worth was measured based on Musk’s offer of stock grants, according to Platformer and the Information, which first reported on the memo.
Stock grants are an opportunity to buy shares that cannot be sold until a set point in time, as opposed to stock options, which – depending on the conditions applied – can be more flexible. The aim is to encourage staff to reach a set valuation by a point in time so that they can sell their shares for cash.
The stock grants could be “sold every six months, based on a third party valuation”, another separate internal email to Twitter staff said.
Musk’s email also stated that before a spate of high-profile, acrimonious layoffs the company had been about four months from running out of money.
Twitter’s headcount has been cut from about 7,500 to about 2,000 employees, according to figures Musk put forward in December.
In his latest memo, he also told staff: “I see a clear, but difficult, path to a >$250B valuation,” which would imply a tenfold increase in share value.
The memo suggests the model would be similar to that which Musk, who also runs Tesla, has adopted at SpaceX, another of his companies, which allows staff to sell shares back to it.
This can be a lucrative incentive if the company’s value rises significantly, but it is not as flexible as selling a listed stock.
Source code is protected in the same way as a ‘literary work’, which means it is copyrightable from the moment that the first line of code is created.
It is seen as the coveted magic formula for a website.
It came as Musk tweeted on March 17 that he wanted to make part of the source code – the part relating to recommended tweets – public.
‘Twitter will open source all code used to recommend tweets on March 31st,’ he said.
‘Our ‘algorithm’ is overly complex & not fully understood internally. People will discover many silly things , but we’ll patch issues as soon as they’re found!
‘We’re developing a simplified approach to serve more compelling tweets, but it’s still a work in progress. That’ll also be open source.
‘Providing code transparency will be incredibly embarrassing at first, but it should lead to rapid improvement in recommendation quality. Most importantly, we hope to earn your trust.’
‘Twitter is being reshaped rapidly,’ Musk wrote in the email seen by The New York Times.
He added that the company could be thought of as ‘an inverse start-up’ and that he believed Twitter could someday be worth $250 billion