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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.

Linda Yaccarino
If Linda Yaccarino’s projections for X are to be believed and her presentation next week goes well, then the banks will try to use those projections to sell the debt into the market and get it off their balance sheets. Photo: Jerod Harris/Getty Images
William D. Cohan
October 1, 2023

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.