America’s smartest schools have given Twitter an F. Harvard, Yale and Stanford universities have all sold big chunks of their Twitter stock as the nine-year-old social media company struggles to prove to investors it has a trajectory of growth.
Yale University, which has a $23.9bn endowment fund, sold all of its 34,345 shares in Twitter – worth just under $1m at Monday’s stock price – over the last quarter. Harvard University, the world’s wealthiest university with a $36.4bn fund, sold 29,856 Twitter shares between April and June. Stanford, which has an endowment fund worth $21.4bn, sold 18,000 shares.
The universities’ sell-offs come as Twitter flounders without a permanent chief executive and analysts increasingly question the company’s future as its once-stunning user growth slows to a trickle.
Twitter’s shares have collapsed from $52 in April to $29 on Monday, a drop of 44%. Over that period, Yale’s Twitter holdings dropped in value by $788,000.
The universities’ regulatory filings were compiled together by Bloomberg on Monday.
Twitter’s chief executive, Dick Costolo, was last month temporarily replaced by co-founder Jack Dorsey after investors demanded explanations for the company’s stalling growth and lacklustre profits.
At the end of last month, Twitter reported the slowest user growth – from 302 million to 304 million active monthly users – since it went public in 2013. Dorsey, who has not confirmed when a permanent CEO will be installed to replace Costolo, told investors that the slowing growth was “unacceptable and we’re not happy about it”.
- This article was amended to reflect that Yale’s Twitter holdings dropped in value by $788,000, not $788m.
