Elon Musk may have gotten a steal in purchasing Twitter at $44 billion, according to one of the platform's former execs, provided he can suck value out of the platform by launching new features and cutting costs.
"It’s really up to the team to execute the way they see fit, but I think they should have billions of users given the content they have that’s so valuable," former Twitter CFO and COO Anthony Noto said on Yahoo Finance Live (video above). "And they should be valued in hundreds of billions of dollars — not tens of billions of dollars — if they can unlock that value."
Noto, who is currently SoFi's CEO, worked at Twitter from 2014 to 2018, starting as CFO and ending as COO. Noto declined to share what changes he would like to see made to the platform, though he did say he thinks Twitter has a lot of potential to execute better under a single leader, such as Elon Musk.
Musk has owned Twitter for less than a week and already he has made some major changes to the platform. He is reportedly eyeing a staff reduction of 50% in order to align costs with sales trends and has sent Twitter CEO Parag Agrawal, CFO Ned Segal, and the board of directors packing.
The Tesla CEO has also taken to Twitter to toss out various changes the platform could make. For instance, Musk reportedly demanded that developers implement software that will make verified users pay to keep their blue checkmarks.
Noto, for his part, weighed in on the conversation by floating a $49 monthly fee for verification in a tweet thread to Musk.
None of these answers are high enough. People will pay $49/mth & if they won’t they should not have been verified to begin with. Perhap a better model is to charge a base verification fee then a per follower fee above a certain scale. Both ideas create many 2nd order benefits.
— Anthony Noto (@anthonynoto) October 31, 2022
Wedbush Analyst Dan Ives agreed that charging users for account verification could be a step in the right direction.
"I think it's a smart move in terms of the monetization of Twitter," Ives told Yahoo Finance Live. "It just starts to move this forward in what's been a treadmill platform."
Brian Sozzi is an editor-at-large and anchor at Yahoo Finance. Follow Sozzi on Twitter @BrianSozzi and on LinkedIn.
Click here for the latest technology business news, reviews, and useful articles on tech and gadgets
Read the latest financial and business news from Yahoo Finance
Download the Yahoo Finance app for Apple or Android
Follow Yahoo Finance on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, Flipboard, LinkedIn, and YouTube