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 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 and Bank of America, 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.
Does the stock necessarily get liquidated for these sorts of transactions though?
Obviously if I owe the bank $100, they will want that in cash, not in $SPY or whatever. But for the Twitter levels of debt could stock just be transferred without being sold first? (Not a rhetorical question, I don’t know how this works.)