Oh dear, how’s he going to pay that $1.5 billion in interest on his loans now? Reading about that, it sounds like Elno is going to have to do some restructuring of his debt with the banks, which gave him $13 billion for this acquisition - which is just about what the company is now worth. Absurdly, Twitter itself is apparently liable for the loans*, not Elno, so sadly he’s not going to lose $13 billion in Tesla stock, but he’s going to have to find the money from somewhere eventually if he wants to keep Twitter.
*I still can’t get over what a complete farce the loans were, and the negligence bordering on malfeasance by the banks in giving him those loans. Here Elno was, wildly overpaying for a company that on a (rare) good year was only marginally profitable, wanting to saddle it with $1.5 billion in annual debt, with absolutely no plan for what to do with the company, much less how to increase its revenue many times over, and the banks didn’t even make sure their multi-billion dollar loans were going to get paid back. Let the whole saga of Elno and Twitter once and forever destroy the myth of the meritocracy and demonstrate that financial institutions give the ultra-wealthy sweetheart deals even to their own detriment.
Well, it’s a billion dollars in revenue. Comparisons with Feb 2020 ($1.3 billion revenue in its fourth quarter) aren’t necessarily super helpful as Twitter’s spending right now is different than it was in 2020. Which I suspect, despite the layoffs and slashing of services, they’re paying - long term, anyways - more, as they still owe most of those workers paychecks, back rent to landlords, legal fees and fines for failure to pay the above, etc. Not to mention the total revenue doesn’t even cover the interest payments on the new debt…
