this post was submitted on 06 Aug 2023
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[–] [email protected] 85 points 1 year ago (16 children)

In July, Musk tweeted about Twitter / X’s financial situation, saying, “We’re still negative cash flow, due to ~50% drop in advertising revenue plus heavy debt load.”

Advertising could be up two fold for all it matters. You sack a company that last turned an annual profit in 2019 with $44B in debt, it won't matter if Musk is shitting gold bricks. You can't pay that size of debt off fast enough. To just get started on that debt Musk would need to make Twitter twenty times more profitable than their 2019 profit. And even then that debt is going to be a monkey on his back for forty years in ideal conditions.

That $44B isn't chump change for Twitter, like maybe if Tencent took a sudden $44B debt they'd make good on it, but they're wildly profitable. Twitter barely gets by and has only gone on this long because of the Tech Bro funding that all but dried up when the interest rates were going up.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 1 year ago

Twitter wasnt saddled with 44B in debt, That was the purchase price, which included $13B in debt

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