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Comment by bko | Hacker News Reader

I don't know if its that meaningful of a distinction. The property does generate profits in that you could rent it out. But yeah, you can finance traditional businesses like that. Buying with debt is generally a good idea because you juice your returns with someone else's money. Of course you give up some fixed amount and take first loss but in general debt is absolutely necessary to make the economics work.

If you can buy a valuable asset for $1 and have a bank cover $9 and it yields 10% return, you're making $1 from $1 invested (minus interest) compared to someone that bought it outright (making $1 on $10 or 10% return). The bank has no upside. If you invest in something bad though or the rate is too high the math changes and you lose 100% if the asset ends up being worth <= $9. That's leverage

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The biggest danger of leverage is the "margin call" or calling the loan - the most common form of leverage people are exposed to prohibit this calling - if you buy a house today on a normal 30 year fixed mortgage in the USA, the bank cannot call the loan if you continue to make payments, even if the house value drops way below the original amount collateralized.

In some states, such as California, a purchase loan is non-recourse, so you could walk away (and many did in the last housing downturn) and the bank can't do anything beyond take the house.

This means if you can weather the downturn you don't get wiped out, you borrowed 80% of the house to buy, put 20% down, it went down 30%, you were underwater, but continued to make payments, and now it's up 20% above where you started.

Margin loans against stocks, etc do not have this, so if you borrowed against $1k worth of stocks you had, and they dropped in value below what the bank wants you to keep as collateral, they can force you to sell at the lower price (or produce more cash/collateral). This means that with leverage you could be right in the long term but wiped out in the short term.

Yea this seems like a significant amount of unnecessary risk for an asset that is unlikely to get better. I wonder how much of a recession/downturn would trigger a margin call for that amount.

Yeah, fair enough. Musk could either "rent" Twitter and pay the money back with profits or "live in" Twitter and direct it toward some other purpose and use his other activities to pay back the debt. So my mineral rights addendum was unnecessary.

On a related note, I always find the loans where the borrower takes on personal liability are in a completely separate category of risk. Anytime you put yourself in a situation where you could possibly ruin your future prospects or mortgage your future labor to a financial institution is much different than your net worth (and your investors' principal) simply going to zero.

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