If you want evidence of the fickle whims of Wall Street, look no further than Twitter: A few weeks ago the social network’s stock was riding the high of Elon Musk’s buyout offer, but since then it has tanked amid an exodus of executives and speculation that Musk might try to walk away from the deal.
By Vance Cariaga
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Three more executives left Twitter this week, Bloomberg reported, including two vice presidents. That followed last week’s departure of two other execs. Those leaving this week include Ilya Brown, a VP of product management; Katrina Lane, VP of Twitter Service; and Max Schmeiser, head of data science, according to internal memos described to Bloomberg. All three chose to leave on their own.
That wasn’t the case last week, when a pair of general managers — Kayvon Beykpour and Bruce Falck — were both fired ahead of Musk’s planned takeover.
Those departures have come during a period of hiring freezes and rescinded job offers as Twitter reevaluates its labor costs, Fortune reported. In a letter to employees last week, CEO Parag Agrawal said Twitter was not on track to hit revenue and user growth targets it established in 2021. Those targets included doubling its revenue and having 315 million monetizable daily active users by the end of 2023.
Not surprisingly, these developments have done no favors for Twitter’s stock price. Shares were trading near $37 early on May 20 — well below Musk’s purchase price of $54.20 a share reached in late April.
Meanwhile, analysts don’t exactly give a ringing endorsement to the stock. The 36 analysts who follow Twitter have an average “Hold” rating on the stock, according to Yahoo Finance. The vast majority rate it either “Hold” or “Underperform.” Argus Research recently downgraded the stock to “Hold” from “Buy.”
