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.
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.
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.
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.
Isn't the difference here that Musk has a tremendous amount of assets in the form of Tesla stock that can be used to repay the debt? It's not like he can declare bankruptcy and stiff them on the bill.
I can see a very real scenario where Drump gets elected, appoints Moron Musk as treasury secretary, and magically wipes off his Xitter debt never to be heard again