The email to employees referred to a new stock compensation program in the San Francisco–based company and announced that shares had been allocated among X Holdings's employees, since Musk purchased it late October.

The compensation plan values the platform at $20 billion, slightly more than Snapchat’s parent company Snap ($18.2 billion) or Pinterest ($18.7 billion), both of which are publicly traded, unlike Twitter.

In an effort to attract and retain talent, Musk said that Twitter would give employees the option of cashing out some shares every six months.

Twitter’s communications department responds to queries from AFP with an automatic response in the form of a poop emoji.

In the internal email, Musk describes how Twitter almost went bankrupt. He says that at one point in its history, the company was so financially unstable that it could have gone under if things didn’t improve soon.

“Twitter was trending to lose ~$3B/year,” Musk said in a message posted Saturday on the platform.

He cited a revenue drop of $1.5 billion a year and a debt-servicing burden of the same amount — leaving it with “only 4 months of money.”

But he then said that it “looks like we will break even” in the second quarter of the year, with advertisers who are now beginning to return.

Since taking control, Musk has sharply cut the group’s payroll from 7,500 employees to fewer than 2,000.

He said in the email that he sees a “clear but difficult path” to a valuation of $250 billion, without specifying how long that might take.

However, in another setback for the company, fragments of Twitter’s source code were published on the development platform GitHub, the latter told AFP on Sunday, confirming a report by the New York Times.

GitHub removed the files from its site at Twitter’s request, but their brief exposure could allow hackers to identify flaws in Twitter’s original software.