Musk’s Twitter purchase was a leveraged buyout
Some people are giving Musk a pass for today’s layoffs because Twitter is unprofitable and needs to cut costs. But the real pressure for cost cutting and the layoffs is that Musk purchased Twitter via a leveraged buyout. He loaded the company with $10B of additional debt and now is facing annual $1B interest payments. The dramatic layoffs with no severance are thus the result of Musk’s decision to buy the company and the acquisition strategy of using a leveraged buyout.
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[ 3.2 ms ] story [ 240 ms ] thread$13 Billion actually.
> and now is facing annual $1B interest payments
Estimated to be 10% APY given where CCC Debt was in April. But the details are sketchy and I haven't been able to get a better estimate than that. I've heard rumors of 50% fixed + 50% adjustable, meaning some of that debt can be as high as 16% right now (today, CCC Debt is going for 16% APY).
So we're looking at $1.3 Billion to $2 Billion in interest payments alone (let alone principal) by my estimate. I've been curious if anyone out there has been able to get a better estimate on Twitter's LBO debt.
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In short, this buyout turned Twitter from a $200-million lost-per-year company into a $1500-million to $2200-million lost-per-year company (pending anyone's better estimate).
I have no idea what average salary was there, but it looks to me like the layoffs don't even cover that.
FWIW I have no idea how finances work, just can imagine Elon getting into weird loopholes.
SpaceX is privately-held, but has raised billions of dollars from dozens of investors, so that won’t fly neither.
Why didn't Ford and Boeing, companies with a much better footing than Musk, simply move into those sectors (EVs and re-usable rockets, respectively) and mop up all those subsidies for themselves?
Tesla did lobby, quite a bit. They've also been angry about the subsidies that require cars to be union made.
Tesla was already a successful, innovative electric car company before it started lobbying like a regular car company.
All of the risk that paid off (what makes a businessman a good businessman) was done in the early days when he invested 6.5 million that he turned into billions.
He didn't create the company, and he didn't create the Roadster.
He deserves credit for believing in the David and turning it into Goliath (of EVs), even if government subsidies helped.
I support the government subsidizing clean energy, electric cars and cheaper access to space and I think it's hypocritical to turn around and shit on the companies that take advantage of those subsidies and do exactly the thing that they are meant to encourage.
Why not, when twitter's operational costs are ~5.5 billion and you are reportedly laying off 50-75% of staff?
And trolling does not help either. The sink thing was trolling and between that and layouts, the remaining people will be dysfunctional for quite a long time.
As you note, it's really hard to cut deep enough to cover $1B in interest payments without cutting stuff that ends up hurting your revenue. As Twitter cuts their R&D, they're leaving themselves open to missing out on the future. Should Twitter have continued to invest in Vine? Well, the benefit of hindsight says "yes" given TikTok's success. As much as everyone is making fun of Meta's metaverse plans, it's certainly possible it'll be important in the future. We really just don't know. I remember everyone saying the iPhone was a silly toy and people would want to keep their Blackberries and Windows Mobile devices with keyboards. We can literally see the future and say, "nah, that'll never happen."
If Musk cuts engineering too much, does the service just become mediocre?
As you say, it's hard to cut deep enough to come up with $1B.
Also most of those folks on levels also get compensated with stock or equity, so it's more than base. Going private means that goes away and their comp also gets slashed. Is he going to take it back public, what beyond base does twitter offer as comp.
Half right: Cash comp is unlikely to be that high, and that's the GP's point. They could only very optimistically cut payroll to cover $1-2 billion.
Half wrong: Cash comp isn't the whole story, you have to use total comp as equity the acquisition of Twitter also included employee equity plans, so as they vest the company will owe employees a cash value. I'm not sure if Twitter RSUs are dollar denominated (fixed cost, $X/quarter) or share denominated (e.g.: Y shares/quarter). The latter will be more costly because Musk paid a premium.
Half again as wrong: total comp is not the all-in cost of an FTE. Benefits and other associated costs, I don't know enough about payroll to even begin to estimate that.
At least one source I found says the average salary of Twitter employees is $97k. (US only total compensation is closer to $300k with an average of $270k. But a lot of that is probably stock options which now must be paid in cash).
So I would imagine the total savings are closer to $250m compared to when Twitter was public but maybe a lot more in savings vs what Twitter would have bled considering the stock options portion of the compensation would have had to have been cash.
> a lot of that is probably stock options which now must be paid in cash
I won't say that's not a big deal, but it's a one-time cost. Paying $500k today to save $300k / year is an excellent move for Twitter - assuming, of course, that Musk is correct in his estimation that the employees cut were not contributing to the company's revenue.
Although level.fyi is probably biased to high earners who post their salaries and has less data for non-engineers.
Twitter borrowed $13 Billion, not Elon Musk. Technically, "X Holdings" took on the debt (a new company Elon started up), but "X Holdings" is effectively Twitter now.
> I can’t just buy a house with a mortgage and walk away.
If you create a business, lets say "Foobar Incorporated", and get the banks to recognize the debt as assigned to "Foobar Incorporated", you can walk away as "Foobar Incorporated" goes bankrupt.
Similarly, it is "X Holdings" who goes bankrupt in this arrangement, not Elon Musk.
But the banks can sell those bands over the next few weeks, so the "final owners" are still yet to be seen.
He owns the company that has loans, but the company has the loans -- not him, he hasn't personally guaranteed them. Company folds, creditors have no recourse (generally).
https://www.financialsamurai.com/non-recourse-states-walk-aw...
https://www.cga.ct.gov/2010/rpt/2010-R-0327.htm
>It is difficult to classify states as strictly recourse or non-recourse. Almost all states allow deficiency judgments under certain conditions, for certain types of property or foreclosure proceedings. However, many states restrict not only the conditions under which deficiency judgments are allowed but the maximum recovery for the creditors.
>he hasn't personally guaranteed them.
Source? I imagine the terms of the loans for the Twitter purchase are not publicly available.
> Source? I imagine the terms of the loans for the Twitter purchase are not publicly available.
We can't know this, I suppose -- but it's quite uncommon from my understanding.
2. If you own a company and the company goes bankrupt with bonds (loans) outstanding, the recourse is that the bondholders (lenders) get control of the company before the shareholders (you) get anything. (This is analogous to the mortgage situation above: the mortgage lender gets the house, become an REO [real-estate owned] on the bank balance sheet.)
If you walk away, you lose your investment, but you aren't on the hook for the money that the bank put up.
It would affect your credit rating (and for musk there would be a similar reputational hit) but neither of you need to pay back the bank.
Well, not always. Banks can add clauses which make you responsible for any losses on the price of the house. In other words, when the price goes below the money owned then that can cause a margin call.
I've never seen this happen.
He’ll be liable only if he personally guaranteed the loans, but the details say otherwise.
There were even pearl clutching op-eds[0] about how it was "immoral" to stop paying a loan on a property that wasn't worth the loan, even though that is is literally the legal and optimum move that companies do all the time.
[0] https://www.csmonitor.com/Commentary/the-monitors-view/2010/...
[1] https://www.nytimes.com/2010/10/04/business/04mortgage.html
I know that at least $3 Billion is fully unsecured (!!), no collateral involved at all. I forget what the other $10 Billion was like right now though. So its complicated.
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Elon Musk was responsible for the $33 Billion. $44 Billion buyout + some debt (I guess Twitter had $2 Billion preexisting debt?) == $46 Billion total buyout, structured as $13 Billion from Morgan Stanley + other banks, and $33 Billion from Elon Musk.
However Elon Musk raised "his end" of the $33 Billion is yet another mystery. He probably sold TSLA shares, or took a loan using TSLA stock as collateral. But this is independent of the $13 Billion I was talking about earlier.
So he might have had to sell ~$20B in stock to pay that extra $13B.
For this Twitter purchase, a lot of it was purchased using some Tesla stock as collateral, but he probably has a personal limit to how much stock he wants to leverage, and he continues to have a fiscal duty to Tesla investors to not over-collateralize his position on TSLA[1], so he probably tried to put as much of the company itself up as collateral for the loans he needed to take it private.
Note that Tesla's 10-Q [2] supports this theory: "If Elon Musk were forced to sell shares of our common stock that he has pledged to secure certain personal loan obligations, such sales could cause our stock price to decline."
Now this has happened before, particularly with Toys-R-Us when a private equity firm came in and did the same thing, using the business itself as collateral to get the loan that pays for all of the currently-public shares. This didn't particularly end well for the company[3].
0: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000156459022...
1: if Tesla's stock price drops below the limit price the banks that have loaned to Musk have placed on their collateral, then the banks might not make back their loan amount+interest. There is a fiscal duty here because such an event with millions of TSLA entering the sell market, even over weeks, will tank the value of the stock
2: https://www.sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1318605/000095017022...
3: https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2018/07/toys-r-...
This buyout may be headed in the same direction, and if it is, I conjecture it will have serious negative repercussions for Musk personally and his other companies. Everyone insists he's playing 5D chess with his moves, but a lot of his success depends upon the strength of his "reality distortion field."
In a very real way, he is successful because people think he's successful. A small failure here and a merger with another company there are merely blips. But a major failure that can be reasonably attributed to his "drinking his own kool-aid"[1] will undermine his ability to move markets or sell products on the sheer strength of Musk being Musk.
[1]: Yes I am aware of the origin of the phrase.
(I did not actually mean to suggest that Musk needed to follow the original LBO strategies, I was just saying that the end of the 80s LBO frenzy happened when those strategies begun to fail with massive LBOs. It's 35 years later. Musk will invent new strategies to win or fail.)
CircleCI is a recent example of this PE play.
Let me get ahead of you there. They would only pay for a quality product which Twitter is definitely not, as a ruiner of modern discourse. Of course there's also the catch that there are no quality products anymore. The whole world of products is devolving at almost the speed of Google Search. But definitely paying is the superior business model
Bootstrap comes to mind - and while that's not something I foresee them "selling", a company large enough to produce a F/OSS project of that size and complexity surely has any number of large, mature products that they could sell or monetize.
Also, the key part of the LBO playbook isn't making quick cash from selling off assets - it's divesting the company of cost centers and investing heavily in profit centers. If you're able to sell the things that aren't making you money, all the better.
1) Tweet things like "I should buy Twitter", "I'm working on moving money around, finding investors, and freeing up money I have tied up to buy Twitter", "Hate selling Tesla, but we need a free speech platform. People will be getting bargains on TSLA!"
2) Sell the Tesla stock he wanted to sell.
3) Make an insulting offer for TWTR at a low value with all sorts of contingencies.
He wasn't planning on finalizing the purchase? When you aren't planning on finalizing the purchase, you put in all sorts of contingencies. You don't waive everything.
I'd say he tried to back out after the market started turning. It became clear that a lot of ad-based platforms were going to be facing some hard times ahead and interest rates started climbing.
I mean, if he'd waited a few months to make his "I want to buy Twitter" play, he'd been able to have offered a ton less. I think Twitter's board of directors went from "we're going to fight Musk" to "Musk must buy us" because of how the market turned. Had Twitter's board "drunk the kool-aid" when they were fighting the buyout?
I think it's in part a case of bad timing. In April, people were paying $130 for GOOG. A month later it was only $113 and now it's $85. META was $210 in April and now it's $89 (their story does have some complications around metaverse stuff). In November 2021, people were paying $54 for TWTR. In January when Musk started buying shares, Twitter was in the $30s. Without Musk's stated buyout offer, Twitter shares probably would have sank like Google or Meta's. Musk probably realized that he wasn't getting Twitter for cheap offering $54.20/share (below their 52-week high), but actually way overpaying given market conditions that were rapidly declining.
Twitter's board of directors wanted to adopt a poison pill to prevent getting $54.20/share in a hostile takeover.
I think it's hard to argue "it was just a ruse to dump Tesla stock". You don't waive due diligence if it's a ruse. Twitter's board wouldn't have been so hostile to it if they thought it was a great price. It's more just that the market conditions shifted a lot over the Spring, Summer, and Fall this year. If Musk had waited 6 months to make the offer, he probably could have bought Twitter for $15-20B instead of $44B.
Who is stupid enough to make these loans? How can they not see they won't get their money back?
I suspect it is a tax thing/way to move money, isn't it?
I wish I was this good at business.
"Making a small fortune is easy. You just have to start with a large fortune and then go into business."
"If you want to be a millionaire, start with a billion dollars and launch a new airline."
Doesn't sound like a good idea.
If Elon follows this model, all updates to the site will stop and the amount of advertising and other forms of money extraction from users will skyrocket, and then as the site bleeds out users he'll eventually sell the IP and any other assets before having the firm declare bankruptcy so that he doesn't have to pay back the loans.
Some advertisers have paused buying, and the $8 blue check thing could help a little but there is major ground to make up and I don't know how it get's done in the short term. I'll be getting some popcorn, but I am rooting for Musk to figure this one out.
If they can cut costs and give people reasons to subscribe, it might work, but if I were the investor being pitched I would certainly have very pointy questions about their conversion rate. Personally I'd amp it to a straight $9.99 and cut all the ads for a subscriber, and the primary focus of my engineering over the next year would be trying to figure out how to incentivize subscriptions, preferably with new useful things not locking away too many existing features behind walls.
Still, I'd love to see one of these social networks succeed on a model where their users pay them money, instead of their subscribers. The incentives are just too perverse when the money comes from ads.
[1]: https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/twitter-announces-f...
To think about it another way: if 25% of active Twitter users subscribe to the plan at $8/mo, they'll double their revenue.
My gut says that that's way optimistic, and a more reasonable expectation is 5-10% conversion. Even if you assume 5% conversion, that's a 20% increase in revenue coupled with a ~50% reduction in labor costs.
I doubt 25% of active users average > 1 tweet per month. Twitter follows power laws. My guestimate is on any given day, <10% author a tweet, <20% comment. The rest of the actives just read, like and retweet. The latter groups have little to benefit from subscribing
I also wouldn't discount the idea that some people are going to subscribe for political reasons, at least initially. HN seems to fairly consistently label Musk lately as "right -wing", but in truth he's become more of an "anti-left-wing" figure. By extension, I think that means that ~50% of the country is going to have a positive impression of his control of Twitter.
I've been watching right wing social media (forums, not Gab/Truth/MeWe/etc.), and they're relishing in the layoffs. That effect won't last long, but it'll likely have a measurable impact on subscriptions and a corresponding long tail.
To validate, I did a quick google search to see how YouTube premium converts, and it seems at 2.5%, which seems realistic to me.
Do we know yet what will be included in the Twitter plan? All I've heard is that it includes "verification", but that in and of itself doesn't strike me as sufficient to drive adoption.
Nobody is going to pay a monthly fee for a checkmark, I feel like I must be missing something because intelligent people are looking at this plan as if it's sensible while it sounds absolutely ludicrous to me.
[0] https://techcrunch.com/2017/01/12/app-net-the-ambitious-proj...
In the short and medium term there's no hope of covering their previous revenue with an $8/mo plan. Long term is murkier, because it includes questions about what other services they may provide for that.
Cutting expenses and growing revenues is at least moving those two things in the right direction but it remains to be seen whether they can bridge the gap. Were we having this discussion in 2018 I'd now say something about how the market seems to be willing to let those gaps go, but here in late 2022 heading into 2023 that's a much harder argument to make.
Then again, for the same reason, a case could be made that Twitter was in trouble regardless. Stock price was already on its way down. It is not clear that there is a solution, period. There is no guarantee that Twitter can exist, recognizable as what we currently think of as "Twitter", without investors willing to close their eyes and imagine what could be, rather than opening their eyes and seeing what is. There is no guarantee that social networks at scale can function on their real revenues, in an environment without effectively 0%-interest funny money. Especially if a recession also starts lowering the ad budgets of other companies. There are some significant diseconomies of scale as you try to scale up one centralized "community", and I remain not entirely convinced this is actually a viable market niche.
I doubt that 50% of the blue checks will pay, way less the ones without.
And Twitter still needs to verify the blue checks otherwise it becomes useless.
Average ad revenue on social networks for US people is about 10x the worldwide average.
This there are two confounding problems with paid Twitter: 1) If you let users that can afford the $8/mo pay to not see ads, you will lose more ad revenue than you gain in subscription fees. 2) The people that are bringing in less ad revenue than a subscription probably won't subscribe.
"Fate loves irony"
Twitter has 450 million users that log in at least once a month.
450,000,000 MDAU * $8 * 12 months = 43.2 Billion/year
But they won't sell 450 M check marks. If we take that 100% down to 1% (4.5M), you're back down to $432 MM / year, which isn't enough to cover the interest payment.
Are there even 4.5M who want a check mark? The current estimate is 420,000. That would be $40 MM / year. If you payed 10 people $200,000/year to support and develop features for the check mark, that would be $2 MM/year, and your profit would be down to $38 MM / year.
Let's say that you had one low wage screener for every 10,000 check marks (to make sure they have a good time and don't see too much spam) That would be 42 employees, add another 3 for management (but they get paid more). The screeners cost $20,000 each because they're offshore, so that's $840,000. Add another $200,000 for their management and that's another million a year down the drain.
If you want to run your own numbers, here's a sheet (make a copy): https://docs.google.com/spreadsheets/d/15WtfofzrEWE65nQH63_Z...
Get advertising completely out of the business model.
[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zwOm4QOZN9k
If a company chooses to reinvest the profit into the company, and therefore increases the valuation, it can be a gain, right? In that case no profit is made.
If you have $1 loss and gain $3 valuation, that's a gain of $2, right?
For example, Twitter didn't make 44B revenue this year on the sale and you won't see it on their budget. Stock holders made that money.
Same will be true again if Elon sells it for a profit or loss.
I get it that shares changing hands doesn't really change anything.
A loss doesn't always mean reinvestment. Reinvestment doesn't always translate to growth. Growth doesn't always Translate to profitability or market value.
It is staggeringly common that businesses fail despite investment and despite growth. Sometimes the product is bad or simply has limited scalability.
Valuations can change rapidly based on expectations of future profit and market conditions. This is especially true in Tech and new companies where valuation is based on future potential and not current profitability.
The general idea is that even if you do a lot of reinvesting and grow your market cap significantly, that market cap can evaporate if it seems unlikely that a company will actually turn into the cash machine people hoped that it would.
For the curious the impact on net income was 766 millions.
See Q2 2022 Results here, net loss was $270 million -https://s22.q4cdn.com/826641620/files/doc_financials/2022/q2...
It's still an open question whether Twitter will succeed with Elon, but it definitely wasn't a healthy company prior to the purchase.
Or do you mean, "They were on track to be profitable?"
Musk is a walking contradiction of his yesterday’s self.
Elon has owned Twitter for less than a week. What are your thoughts around declaring his ownership a complete failure?
They don't appear to be without severance[1].
>Today is your last working day at the company, however, you will remain employed by Twitter and will receive compensation and benefits through your separation date of February 2, 2023.
>Within a week, you will receive details of your severance offer, financial resources extending beyond your Non-Working Notice period.
[1] https://www.businessinsider.com/read-blunt-email-telling-twi...
Does anyone know if part of these agreements includes not seeking other employment (a typical clause these days)?
A more common clause in California employment contracts for salaried employees limits outside employment to work that does not interfere with one’s job responsibilities, based on the idea that as a salaried employee that job should be your primary job
I'd consider three months' pay borderline "generous". I see two weeks' as the baseline, and anything over six weeks as "good".
My understanding of the WARN Act is that it requires 60 days "notice". It sounds like Twitter is giving 90 days notice along 90 days of mandatory PTO, effective immediately.
Having been laid off relatively recently (~2 years ago) and actively involved in hiring today, I expect that's not going to be long enough to seamlessly move to a new position, but it should be enough time and money to cut things back and weather the transition without dipping into savings - assuming you have savings, of course.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=33450753
How does that affect other employment? Does this mean you can't go get another job until Feb 2, otherwise you have to quit (and receive no more severance)?
And just to double check: if I was laid off "normally" tomorrow and got some severance package, that package still comes by way even if I got a new job on Monday? For this hypothetical let's place us in California.
You should tell your new employer what's going on - they'll almost certainly run a background check and see it. But absent some specific odd situation, they aren't going to care.
> if I was laid off "normally" tomorrow and got some severance package, that package still comes by way even if I got a new job on Monday?
Technically, this would be subject to whatever terms your former employer wrote into the severance terms. But again, absent a weird situation, they don't care, they're just trying to get rid of you.
It's possible that if you're in an at-will employment state they could fire you for cause and claim that working for another company violates something, but I think that would be legally a bit dicey.
You think that if he paid completely up front he wouldn't care about cutting costs? Why? The pressure would still be there -- it would just be in the form of pressure to recoup his investment
If you buy with debt, you have to pay every month (or year, or whatever). So obviously you have to either have deep pockets to pay out of pocket, or generate more cash flow, and you have to do it NOW, because the debt must be serviced now.
If you buy with cash and/or equity, you take on an opportunity cost, but you can afford to make longer-term investments, and you can afford to take your time with cost-cutting or other measures.
The pressure to recoup your investment is certainly there, but the urgency to generate cash-flow in the short term is not.
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All that being said, if Musk doesn't think Twitter investing in initiatives that will take a while to pay off, but he does think it needs short-term moves like firing everyone in sight and putting Trump back on the platform and getting rid of pesky "activists" who think "freedom of speech" includes telling advertisers that they face boycotts...
Well then, debt is clearly the winning move.
In addition to having to pay the interests on the debt usually you also need to keep some financial metrics within some predefined thresholds - facing penalties in case of breach.
I've heard this taking point elsewhere.
I wonder if he really believes that. I don't; in my experience, adverts have become far more obvious — and far more commonly self-advertisements, e.g. Duolingo advertising it's own paid features — over the course of this year. Feels like all businesses are pulling back on all their expenses, advertising included, at the same time, not mere activism.
To the very rich, cash is terrible because of the tax obligations. That being said, the whole Musk Tax rigmarole [0] is funny to me for various reasons. Musk's stated reasoning here is not quite correct, and somewhat self serving; at the same time, I think many people would not be satisfied even if Musk was taxed at 100% of his net worth.
0. https://www.cnbc.com/2021/11/07/elon-musk-faces-a-15-billion...
What is risky about the situation at hand from the lender's perspective? What is the scenario in which the lender isn't made whole?
Sucks for the employees that are collateral damage though.
"If bad things happen to you, it's because you're bad person. Billionaires wouldn't visit their anger on good people"
Heck, even cesspools are great if you use them right.
But it's not fun to be in a cesspool, and it's not fun to have a knife in you, and having a knife in you while you're in a cesspool is just about the worst.
personally I have already downloaded my data & started deleting my old tweets/likes: https://tweetdelete.net
who know where musk will sell this data to.
They sold Twitter at the perfect overvalued moment, for more than it was overvalued at. They’d be idiots not to do their best to close the deal.
It’s like if you sell a house last year at sky high prices, you shake on it with someone offering you a million more than the house is worth and the house is leveled by Godzilla in the meantime.
I agree.
Yet, if the argument in these comments is that Elon Musk is the Bad Guy(tm) because he overpaid for Twitter just as the Federal Reserve decided to start cranking up rates and as the world descends into recession, that argument ignores the elephant in the room.
And also, they did not knew Must will be so boneheaded about it all. He could have actually tried to make it look like he means to make twitter work.
Agrawal had 2.3% of the company, and cashes out over a billion on the sale.
Edit: this is incorrect. Dorsey had ~2.3%, not Agrawal.
(Wrong number of shares and wrong calculation before: He had 0.002% of the company and cashes out less than ten million on the sale.)
Agrawal himself had 2.3% of the company, and gets a billion+ dollar cut of the sale.
Imagine how you would feel if you passed on the deal and twitter stock followed Facebook and other tech down the drain.
Edit: this is incorrect. Dorsey had ~2.3%, not Agrawal.
~500'000 out of ~765'000'000 outsanding shares = 0.065%
https://www.nasdaq.com/market-activity/insiders/agrawal-para...
(I previous gave a wrong number calculated using a different source - removed to avoid confusion)
Is there anything like old twitter out there? Twitter with an open API during the Arab Spring was kind of an amazing time. I guess really it's all about TikTok at this point for that sort of thing.
What's the alternative to Facebook? ....uhhhh, I dunno, is MySpace still around?
What's the alternative to Instagram? ....maybe TikTok? but that's just for videos
What's the alternative to TikTok? ....YouTube, I guess?
And round and round it goes.
Yes; most people will only have heard of the big behemoth players in the social media field. Triply so for non-technical people.
What that means is we who are technical need to start exploring alternatives and spreading the word about them. Not that we just need to shrug and accept that we will be playing in monopolists' sandboxes for the rest of our lives.
Okay, fuck this.
Thanks.
A more accurate version might be "Musk's inability to get out of a bad decision to buy the company".
None of this surprises me. For all of Elon's recent bravado about "free speech", he is a capitalist first and foremost. When it became clear he couldn't get out of it, I predicted he'd just follow the private equity playbook: cut costs, fold or sell-off non-core assets, saddle the company with complicated debt and then sell it off while claiming victory.
He'll probably retain all the power with a Silicon Valley share structure.
None of this is surprising.
I hope we cam go back to a more sane financial/investing world.
Why does Twitter owe money to the banks, that was used to actually buy Twitter?
Anyone here who can explain this to me?
I would love to know the magic behind this. The next thing I will do is going to the Porsche dealer, finance a car and happily watch the monthly rate beeing paid from the dealer's account.
They'll give the loan to a new company you create and that company will be responsible for paying it back.
A buyout is just an extension of that.
Increases risk and exposure for the company, but not Musk personally.
Form a company, get a big loan, buy a bunch of luxury cars ... profit??
After you buy it, you don't just get to use it the way you want to all the time.
musk has access to debt and is experienced enough to know how to employ that access to limit his (and his investors') risk exposure. this is literally finance 101.
with that said, should financial systems be tilted this way to favor the wealthy and their capital? no, probably not. while musk is an outlier, in general there's a weak correlation between successes if you take out this skewed access to capital. instead of a few hundred billionaires, we could have hundreds of thousands more of entrepreneurs founding and leading useful companies.
Barring an unexpected rally in credit markets this year, the group of lenders, led by Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Barclays, have conceded they will be stuck holding the debt on their books for months or even longer and will probably end up incurring huge losses on the financing package. "