Twitter’s Debt Time Bomb & Linda Alarms
A meeting between C.E.O. Linda Yaccarino and seven Wall Street banks could decide whether investors can finally sell off the company’s debt without losing their shirts in the process. Plus, notes on the fallout from Bill Gates’ Tesla short.
On October 5, Twitter/X C.E.O. Linda Yaccarino will reportedly meet with representatives of the seven banks that are still white-knuckling $13 billion of Twitter’s debt, in what is easily one of the most important Wall Street summits of the year. The value of this debt, after all, is wholly dependent on the likelihood that Elon Musk will be able to pay it back and make it money good, which he is currently doing by forking over quarterly interest payments totaling around $1.2 billion a year—so no small feat, even for the world’s richest man, when Twitter has lost users, lost advertising, hasn’t turned a profit since 2019 and prospects for turning it all around look dim, at best.
Even though the Twitter debt is senior, and mostly secured by Twitter’s assets, it has always been a risky piece of paper. At the time Elon took over, just before last Halloween, Twitter’s EBITDA was around $1 billion a year, making for an EBITDA/interest ratio of barely 1:1—not great by any standard. Then there was the fact that, at 13x EBITDA, Twitter’s debt load is gargantuan, even for a leveraged buyout. The saving grace, the banks must have thought when they committed to the deal in April 2022, was Elon himself, who was investing $24 billion of his own money, alongside the $7 billion that his friends (among them, Larry Ellison, Saudi Prince Al Waleed, the always self-assured Andreessen Horowitz, the Qataris, etcetera) were also investing in the Twitter equity. All together, of the insane $44 billion purchase price for Twitter, at least $31 billion, or 70 percent, was equity. That had to be comforting to the banks.
