Putting Twitter's loss in perspective

Today, Twitter (NYSE symbol TWTR) lost 7% of its value to close at $16.69/share at a market cap of $11.4bn. That's a loss of approximately $800m of of share capital.

To put that in perspective, that's 8M $100 bills. The NYSE (New York Stock Exchange) is open from 9:30am to 4pm; 6.5 hours, or 23,400 seconds. A well-tuned toilet flush cycle is 35 seconds, so you could get in 668 back-to-back flushes during NYSE opening hours. Therefore you'd have to flush 12,000 $100 bills each time in order to match TWTR's loss. At 150 bills/stack that's 80 stacks, and I can't see you getting more than 1 stack per flush in a single toilet, so I would characterise today's loss as a rate of 80 NYSE-toilets.

I hesitate to ascribe all this loss to Twitter's de-verification of arch-gay-conservative @Nero on 9th January when Twitter was $20, but its share price has descended in more or less a straight line since then. Today the NYSE actually went very slightly up but Twitter still plummeted.

It certainly wasn't helped by 6 hours of partial unavailability of Twitter today, but I suspect that was the straw breaking the camel's back.