Wall Street banks shed Musk's last corporate X debt

Wall Street's biggest banks are finally getting out of the $13 billion debt quagmire created by Musk. On Monday, Wall Street banks sold the last portion of the debt they took out to finance Musk's 2022 acquisition of Twitter, according to people familiar with the matter. The $1.20 billion loan was sold at 98 percent of face value. The sale was long overdue. In April 2022, Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and five other banks agreed to provide loans to help Musk buy Twitter. The plan was to split about $13 billion of debt, sell it to investors and earn millions of dollars in fees. But by the time the deal closed, the market had plummeted and investors were wary of betting on Twitter's debt. Those unwanted loans stayed on the bank's balance sheet for more than two years, and the financial outlook for Company X, rebranded from Twitter, looked increasingly bleak. By the summer of 2024, the Company X deal was considered the worst acquisition a bank had agreed to finance since the 2008 financial crisis. (Wall Street Journal)