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this post was submitted on 02 Jan 2024
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Wasn't the Twitter buyout for a significant portion of his wealth that he like, claimed he didn't even have?
All those people say things like "well they're risking their wealth!" he seems to be a pretty good example of someone who "risked a lot of their wealth", objectively fucked up and should have lost at least most of it, and has come out essentially unscathed.
If you can collosally fuck up a whole company, and your wealth doesn't even move, what are you even risking? At all?
Another part of being a billionaire is saying you have it when it's prudent, and saying you don't when it's not.
He paid around $20 billion cash (by selling Tesla stock) and loaned another 6.25 billion personally (loan secured by more Tesla stock). The rest was funded by various bank loans that are now owed by Twitter itself.
One of the neat tricks you can do when you're wealthy is loan billions of dollars to buy a company, then you put those loans in the name of the company you just bought, so you don't have any personal risk. The reason he still needed to pony up $26 billion in cash is because banks thought it was too risky to loan the full amount. They might now regret loaning even this much, Twitter has a substantial debt burden and I understand ad revenues aren't doing great.
Obviously, since the company is private now we don't get as much insight into financials.
I can’t figure out why BlueSky never comes out of invite-only. It would absolutely crush Twitter in this moment when there is so much demand for a direct replacement.
I wonder why revenues aren't great. /s
He sold a few shares to get the money, besides also taking up loans and gifts from others in his billionaire club.