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Elon Musk's Twitter takeover has ended up as the worst buyout deal for banks since the financial crisis (www.businessinsider.com)

submitted 4 months ago by MicroWave to c/economics

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Elon Musk's Twitter acquisition ended up being the worst financing deal for banks since 2008, the WSJ said.
The $13 billion in loans Musk took out have been stuck on banks' balance sheets.
The loans have cut into pay for bankers and lenders' ability to finance other deals, the Journal reported.

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[–] [email protected] 25 points 4 months ago (2 children)

Idk, you buy a brand and one of the largest social networks everywhere, then you perform some genius business moves:

"Cut waste", fire the bulk of your talent and hamper the capacity of your network.
Break embedding for a while to disable reply visibility on the public web
Ask developers and operators "how many lines of code they contributed" and to print it out
You completely remove the iconic branding of your network, and do a botched job of redirecting.
You reinstate trolls and right wing misinformation.
You cheapen the verified label.
You launch a streaming platform on the hampered infrastructure.

How is any of this supposed to be moves that any lender could expect a return from?

[–] [email protected] 17 points 4 months ago* (last edited 4 months ago) (2 children)

I'm embarrassed to admit but I brought into the Musk hype early on. You know Tesla and SpaceX.

But the second he started talking about programming (something I know a lot about) I realized he doesn't have a clue.

He's good at talking and getting smart people to do the actual work. In fact he's not even great at talking anymore.

[–] [email protected] 10 points 4 months ago (1 children)

Electric vehicles and space exploration are two things that need to happen for humanity's long term survival. It isn't gullibility to applaud someone for moving either thing forward, even if they're just the money guy. We live in a capitalist society, that is just what was going to happen short of another FDR or JFK restoring trust in American government.

It's ignoring the evidence afterwards that is the problem, and you didn't, so there's nothing to be ashamed of.

[–] [email protected] 3 points 4 months ago

Thank you, that's very kind.

[–] trolololol 6 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Makes me wonder how good he is at rocket business. And makes me wonder how good Boeing aerospace is if they make Elon look like a genius.

[–] AA5B 1 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago) (1 children)

He ‘s sufficiently geeky to speak the language, to invest in things beyond the next quarter and be willing to take a risk in things not yet proven to be profitable. Those are good things for a ceo.

Maybe I give him too much credit (like I used to with Trump), but in the beginnings I assumed he was forced into twitter after running his mouth off into what could be securities fraud if he didn’t follow through. . And he’s so lost. So badly lost

Meanwhile Tesla needs attention and direction but losing its focus on cars is not the way. He really should have spawned off another company so the robotics stuff could sink or swim without impacting his successes

[–] trolololol 2 points 3 months ago

"CEO is smart because he tried to look for profit in multiple quarters at the same time" would make a great headline at Forbes

[–] IphtashuFitz 12 points 4 months ago (1 children)

How could you forget publicly telling advertisers to “go fuck yourself”?

[–] [email protected] 8 points 4 months ago

That's a galaxy brain business move, too genius for the genius list.