Twitter Fulfills Nine Years of Massively Unfulfilled Promises on the NYSE

While the stock made a splash with its trading debut on the New York Stock Exchange in November 2013, rising 73% on its first day, the company has since failed to impress investors as it continues to grow its user base and ramp engagement. was fighting for.

Twitter’s shares doubled during its tenure as a listed company, which equates to an 8.4% increase in one year. That’s less than the S&P 500 Index’s 11% annualized return and the Nasdaq 100 Index’s climb of 15%.

“There’s no doubt that it has never lived up to investors’ expectation of going public when it was trading at nearly double earlier this year,” said Alec Young, chief investment strategist at MapSignals. “Most investors have been disappointed with the stock’s performance, growth, penetration – it seems it never moved forward with users and the kind of mass adoption of other services.

Musk completed his $44 billion purchase of the social media company and put the world’s richest man in charge of the struggling social network after months of public and legal wrangling over the deal. The buyout will take Twitter private about a week before the “TWTR” stock ticker turns nine years old.

Twitter’s poor performance compared to its social peers largely reflects that while revenue growth on the micro-blogging platform has been consistently slow, others have been able to monetize their user bases. Over the past five years, Twitter has posted an average revenue growth of 19%, compared to 29% at Meta Platform Inc., 50% for Snap Inc., and 51% for Pinterest Inc.

However, Musk’s interest in the company has ended its run as a public stock on a positive note. It gained 24% this year, making it the top performer among components of the S&P 500 communications services companies. Its stock performance has largely outperformed its peers in a year, thanks to a decline in growth stocks from the Federal Reserve raising interest rates, rising inflation and the prospect of an imminent recession.

For Twitter’s stock investors, it’s been a wild ride with Musk in the driver’s seat.

“The rollercoaster track they’ve taken Twitter shareholders on has ended in the last scream of excitement for those who are sticking along for the ride,” said Susannah Streeter, senior investment and markets analyst at Hargreaves Lansdowne. “While the $54.20 per share price is still well below the highs above $77 that the tech reached in March 2021 in the rush of the pandemic, it is well above $32, a year after the company was being traded. There was, a few weeks before Musk slapped his generous offer on the table.”

This story has been published without modification in text from a wire agency feed.