Nearly two years after Elon Musk’s acquisition, X’s business is still struggling to climb out of the deep hole it fell into under his ownership.

The $13 billion that Elon Musk borrowed to buy Twitter has turned into the worst merger-finance deal for banks since the 2008-09 financial crisis.

The seven banks involved in the deal, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, lent the money to the billionaire’s holding company to take the social-media platform, now named X, private in October 2022. Banks that provide loans for takeovers generally sell the debt quickly to other investors to get it off their balance sheets, making money on fees.

  • @[email protected]
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    1738 months ago

    The losses on banks’ balance sheets from the deal are also biting into potential bonuses for some bankers, the report said.

    They should just be fired. This wasn’t a deal that looked like it had good potential but didn’t pan out. It was obviously a bad buy right from the start and the guy who was going to run the private enterprise was both spread too thin to run it well, was increasingly erratic in his behavior, and wasn’t any good at the business he was taking over. Everyone knew it was a bad deal at the time.

    • Pelicanen
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      308 months ago

      Yes, but have you considered: Tesla line go up. Elon CEO. When Elon CEO, Twitter line go up. Logic.

  • Mayor Poopington
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    1118 months ago

    Guess the saying is true, if you owe the bank $1000, that’s your problem. If you owe the bank $13 billion, its the bank’s problem.

  • Media Bias Fact CheckerB
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    48 months ago
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  • NutWrench
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    148 months ago

    Morgan Stanley and BOA will find ever bigger suckers to sell those loans to once they’ve had a chance to repackage them.

    It is long past time we got over our child-like worship of billionaires.

    • @[email protected]
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      8 months ago

      We’ll never get over our worship of them, because it is engineered.

      The media machines they own, including every market news site, fills every stream with deceptive articles of the 8 things billionaires do that made them rich and the 7 the plebs do that stop them from being billionaires, constantly defying them while shaming you for not being like or serving them better.

      The natural state for any society where the elites live large while the masses struggle to survive is to DESPISE the elites, whether violent recourse would be suicide or not.

      The love/deification for our elites by many of those they oppress is part of their engineered propaganda to keep it that way with their bully pulpit artificially, and that pulpit is more than loud enough to drown out and ruin the credibility of any prominent voices of reason. Easier for them to maintain the market capitalist machine like this than through overt slavery, they just convince the masses it’s in their interests to self-enslave.

  • Optional
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    1278 months ago

    At the time, Musk himself had complained that the price for Twitter was too high, but he decided to go ahead with the deal after waffling over it for a while.

    Mmmmmmmmm that’s not how I’d describe it, Marketwatch.

    • @[email protected]
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      528 months ago

      I mean, he did have to decide if he wanted to pay the money and take the company, or just pay the money, as he’d signed a solid agreement. So there was a choice.

      • @[email protected]
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        8 months ago

        In retrospect, paying the money and not taking the company might actually have been the more sound financial decision.

    • @[email protected]
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      48 months ago

      Guess they didn’t want to say that Musk shit posted so hard that he ended up being forced to buy the company.

  • @[email protected]
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    708 months ago

    Bank of America and Morgan Stanley commanded the top two spots in the U.S. leveraged-finance investment banking league tables in 2021 and 2022 during some quarters before Musk bought Twitter, according to data from Dealogic. In 2023 and 2024, JPMorgan and Goldman Sachs—which didn’t finance the Twitter deal—have held the top spots.

    He’s so toxic that being involved with him can unseat you from being the top two in your industry. This will make people a bit more hesitant to get into bed with him (gross) in the future.

    Barclays’s top investment bankers on the mergers and acquisitions team were told at a New York dinner early last year that compensation for everyone in the room would be cut by at least 40% from the prior year. The bank had several hung deals hurting its performance but X was by far the largest, according to people familiar with the situation.

    When you’re slashing compensation for your people, especially the ones who bring in real money, you know it’s serious. I’m happy to see X crash and burn and pull down bankers with it. Dumbass mf.

    • wia
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      28 months ago

      You sweet summer child… You think this will affect anyone at the top? All the rich people will walk away unaffected as more layoffs roll down or they borrow from the gov/tax payers.