Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis

https://lemmy.world/post/18877132

Elon Musk’s Twitter Takeover Is Now the Worst Buyout for Banks Since the Financial Crisis - Lemmy.World

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 [https://www.wsj.com/topics/person/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 [safari-reader://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/MS] and Bank of America [safari-reader://www.wsj.com/market-data/quotes/BAC], 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.

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.
The thing is, selling off the amount of Tesla stock that he’d need to to pay off the debt would cause Tesla stock to plummet, leaving him significantly less wealthy and putting Tesla in danger. So even though he technically has the money to pay them, he functionally doesn’t.
Of course he can, it would just inconvenience him.
Does he seem for even a split second like someone who can handle being temporarily inconvenienced?