Elon Musk made a $13 billion blunder. Wall Street still wants to work with him.
- Elon Musk's $43 billion acquisition of Twitter has a new distinction: It was the worst banking deal since 2008.
- The banks that lent Musk $13 billion are struggling to resell the debt, causing them internal problems.
If you're a person who enjoys watching Elon Musk fall on his face, you may have already seen this: Musk's deal to buy Twitter now has the title of Wall Street's worst acquisition since the 2008 financial crisis.
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.
They'd like to resell the debt to someone else. But that's very hard to do when Twitter's revenue is in free-fall and Musk is alternately telling advertisers to go fuck themselves or suing them.
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.
Except: This is where the difference between Elon Musk, the richest man in the world, and just about everyone else, manifests.
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.
More important, per The Wall Street Journal, which first reported the story: The banks that lent Elon Musk $13 billion so he could incinerate that money want to keep working with Elon Musk.
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 even now, after seeing with their own eyes how erratic and self-destructive Musk can be, they still want to be in that 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.