It's hard to imagine tech giants getting worse than ever. But this dreadful scenario recently happened to a popular social media platform, Twitter, as its stock price fell lower than it was when the company first went public.
Twitter's shares sold for $26 in its initial public offering in November 2013. On Thursday, it went lower than $26 for the first time since. Twitter's stocks went as high as $74.72 at $45 in December, which made it an instant hit in the Wall Street. But after that, it has only been on a downward slope.
The social media platform's shares lost 5.8 percent Thursday, which is a new all-time low for the company. This is amid the general selloff where the Standard & Poor's 500 index fell 2.1 percent. Twitter's shares dropped to $24.92 and are down to a very low 28 percent in 2015. This means the investors who bought Twitter shares during the company's public debut are back to where they originally started.
The selloff can be attributed to the frankness of Twitter co-founder Jack Dorsey, who said that it would take a while before their company can reverse its downward slope of user growth. Analysts applauded his bravery to tell the truth, but investors reacted quite differently.
Twitter has 316 million user postings per month sharing 140-character messages. This is a very small number compared to Facebook's 1.5 billion. The platform can be considered a niche forum with mostly celebrities and journalists using it.
The stakes is whether Twitter can be a mainstream social media platform than just a niche forum. A lot of investors were also unhappy with how the company was run under CEO Dick Costolo, who stepped down earlier this year. This is why another reason for the selloff is the issue with the board's search for another CEO and Dorsey's questionable qualms with his job.
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