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Comment by pxmpxm | Hacker News Reader

Twitter was a public company, so whatever financial issues were far more readily accessible before the acquisition. That alone should inform you of the true agenda of that narrative.

The amusing part is that this narrative is ultimately getting checked by reality - with each passing month of the company not immediately failing as per the media hysterics, people will have to face that uncomfortable cognitive dissonance.

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> That alone should inform you of the true agenda of that narrative.

Agenda you say? You look at any business and see that they took on massive amount of debt, and said debt did not go to improve their bottom line. And calling that “financial issues” is an agenda now?

Cashflow isn't the issue that people talk about re twitter? The narrative has very clearly been defined as "firing so many people that it won't be able to operate", where as the real agenda is purely ideological, as someone else mentioned.

There have been structural issues related profitability literally since around 2012, which is not something that relates to capital structure.

They switched equity for debt. This is normal when taking private a publicly traded business. Both the lender and the borrower know what they are doing better than outside commenters who have never spent any time studying "going private" financing.

Finance 101 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Modigliani%E2%80%93Miller_theo...

It’s normal but paying considerably over the retail price is less common. Musk effectively gave TWTR shareholders a multibillion dollar bonus, which is why they sued to keep him from backing out of the deal.

“Its normal” doesn’t mean “it’s not an additional expense imposed on the post merger company.”

Mergers where the loading of debt onto the company to finance the merger is a major cause of bankruptcy also aren’t that unusual. (For both public firms and firms taken private.)

> Both the lender and the borrower know what they are doing better than outside commenters who have never spent any time studying "going private" financing

It's pretty clear the borrower didn't know what they're doing when they made this deal. The borrower even tried to get the deal canceled (or maybe just renegotiate) by going through the court, and failed.

The lenders moved forward because they know the borrower is good for it. And the borrower can afford to lose even more billions and still function. The borrower can afford to make mistakes of this size.

I think you're confusing "this has been allowed to continue" with "all parties know what they're doing".

> debt did not go to improve their bottom line

If you want to have any chance of being objective, you will include the cost-cutting that was done as well, which did improve the bottom line. At any rate, it will be very interesting to revisit all these threads a year from now. My bet is it will work out fine, but we'll see soon enough, right?

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