Schadenfreude fans who read on will learn that the banks who lent him $13 billion to buy Twitter (he put up some of the remaining $30 billion himself, along with pitch-ins from the likes of Oracle founder Larry Ellison and newly converted Trump fan Marc Andreessen's firm ) have serious lender's remorse.
The problem for the lenders, including Morgan Stanley and Bank of America, is so acute it even affected some of their bankers' bonuses. I can hear some of you munching on your popcorn as I type this.
For starters: Say you or I make a terrible investment and then compound it by driving down the revenue of the thing we bought by 50%. We might have a very hard time covering the interest on the debt we took on to make that terrible investment.
And that might lead to the banks taking our stuff. But Musk — again, the richest man in the world — has been making his payments, which run some $1.5 billion a year.
… they are eager to be well-positioned to work with Musk and his six companies that range from electric-vehicle maker Tesla to Neuralink and xAI. Many view a possible initial public offering of Musk's rocket company SpaceX or his Starlink satellite business as a fee-generating event that they don't want to miss out on.
That is: The whole reason they lent Musk $13 billion in the first place wasn't because they thought Musk had a great plan for Twitter (though some surely did). It's that they wanted to be in the Elon Musk business.
And that has some cold hard logic to it: SpaceX, for instance, is theoretically worth $175 billion . You can debate whether that's a "real" valuation or not, but if Musk ever does take it public, it's going to be a giant IPO, and banks will be tripping over themselves to get a piece of it.
So laugh at Elon Musk all you want. But know that his bankers will keep telling him they're deadly serious about backing him.
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