> Fidelity’s internal analysts have decided that if it were to be sold today it would go for about half that Not quite. It depends on which exact accounting me

> Fidelity’s internal analysts have decided that if it were to be sold today it would go for about half that Not quite. It depends on which exact accounting method they're using, but the most vanilla version would usually look like this: as long as they belive that Twitter will survive as a company, they will apply 'going concern' valuation [0]. So they try to estimate the value that the company will generate for its owners. Such value could materialize eg in the forms of dividends or share buybacks. Technically, they will try to estimate the company's potential to make such distributions. If they believed that Twitter was eg insolvent, they would apply 'gone concern' valuation, so they would try to estimate for how much each of the company's assets would sell, assuming that the company itself would vanish. Other accounting methods would include eg 'mark-to-market' (for publicly traded assets) or eg 'mark-to-model' (more common for financial instruments without a market price). [0] https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goingconcern.asp https://www.investopedia.com/terms/g/goingconcern.asp