As Twitter Goes Down Again, Report Highlights How Fragile Its Infra Has Become

techdirt.com

11 points·mhoad··6 comments

So before Musk took over, Twitter was paying $100m in interest over its debts. After Elon took over, they're now paying $1.2b annually in interest and had to do 3 layoffs.

I'm just curious, how did Elon acquire Twitter using loans guaranteed by his Tesla shares, and then he was able to unload his loans on Twitter, the company?

> I'm just curious, how did Elon acquire Twitter using loans guaranteed by his Tesla shares, and then he was able to unload his loans on Twitter, the company?

Well that's easy. And is very typical for all private equity transactions.

I take out a loan to buy a company. Once I own the company I can do what ever I want with it. The loans were taken out to buy the company and therefor get assigned to the company.

That just makes sense as the company is the reason for the loans in the first place.

So basically everyone got screwed except the shareholders, who made out with an overpriced sale to Elon.

The actual company got pretty f'ed because it got a loan to buy itself out. Then it had to lay off most of its workers because it got a loan to buy itself out.

Think about a secured loan to buy a house, ie a mortgage.

Very standard for leveraged buyouts. It rarely works out well, and there's some argument that it should be banned, but it's not unusual.

Is there a generally agreed upon definition for "outage" in engineering circles? Because the linked article cites "yet another major global outage at Twitter," but the article it links to says this:

> People's timelines are acting wonky on mobile and desktop.

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