Close your eyes, Twitter shareholders.
It’s been one year since Dick Costolo’s departure and Twitter’s stock is still a mess
Twitter has lost nearly 60 percent of its value in the past year.
Yesterday, June 11, marked the one-year anniversary of the date former Twitter CEO Dick Costolo unexpectedly announced he was leaving the company, passing the reins to current CEO and co-founder Jack Dorsey, who took the job along with an “interim” distinction that was ultimately dropped.
Costolo’s departure was applauded by fed-up investors who were sick of watching Twitter’s stock slide. And Dorsey’s appointment was greeted with hope that he would quickly turn around the product and, by association, the stock price.
But that has not happened. In the year since that announcement, Twitter has simply remained Twitter — a company plagued by a lack of continuity on its executive roster, a failure to get its product into more consumer hands and an inability to tell a convincing story to Wall Street.
And that combo hasn’t helped the company’s stock.
Since Costolo announced he was stepping down, Twitter’s stock has fallen more than 60 percent, closing Friday near an all-time low at $14.02. Its market capitalization, which was roughly $23.5 billion the day Costolo announced his departure, is now below $10 billion. (That’s just a little more than half of Snapchat’s latest valuation on the private markets.)
Here’s what Twitter’s stock slide looks like in chart form:
Things don’t look immediately more promising, either. Twitter is without a head of consumer product, the first time we can recall a vacancy at what is one of the company’s most important positions. It’s fresh off a quarter of disappointing financial results. And there isn’t much — with the exception of an NFL streaming deal this fall — expected on the horizon.
Plus, Dorsey — as Twitter’s creator, the de facto product leader — is still running the company part-time. At his other public company, Square, shares have dropped 30 percent since their first day of trading last November.
It’s been a tough year for Twitter’s new regime. Onto the next.
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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