Vanderbilt University, meanwhile, calculated Twitter’s brand value was somewhere between US$15 billion and US$20 billion. It is worth dwelling on that range of estimates: Musk, it implies, may have trashed an asset worth anything between 9 per cent and 45 per cent of what he paid for Twitter.
WHAT IS TWITTER WORTH NOW?
That disagreement matters: We live, we are told by the McKinsey Global Institute, in an era of “intangible capitalism”, where assets less physical than a machine or a factory are driving corporate growth. Yet we cannot agree on what those assets are worth.
Twitter is a private company, and it seems unlikely that such inconsistent outside estimates keep its impulsive owner up at night, but the same discrepancies affect even the world’s largest public companies. If you want to know what Apple’s brand is worth, Brand Finance puts the figure at US$298 billion, Interbrand says US$482 billion, while Kantar BrandZ comes up with an US$880 billion valuation.
That is a near-US$600 billion disagreement about one of the most scrutinised companies on the planet. Depending on which of these sources you believe, meanwhile, the value of the Microsoft brand may have plunged 21 per cent in the past year, or leapt 32 per cent.
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