My colleague Alexander Saeedi covers banking and finance and last week he and I were

talking and what's one of your favorite things talking about

Elon Musk's purchase of Twitter and the debt he borrowed to pay for it.

Let's cast our minds debt he borrowed to pay for it.

Let's cast our minds back to 2022, when Elon Musk bought X, or Twitter,

as it was called at the time.

The drama began in April, when Musk revealed he owned a big chunk of Twitter stock.

Elon Musk has bought nearly 10% of Twitter for an investment of around $3 billion.

You think that Elon Musk has greater plans to become a little bit more actively involved in

Twitter? The world's richest man set off a firestorm by revealing his bid to buy Twitter for over $43 billion.

The deal is done.

Twitter has been sold to Elon Musk.

Musk paid $44 billion for Twitter. A lot of that money came from him, but not all of it.

For much of the rest, he turned to a group of banks who provided

loans to make the purchase. 13 billion dollars worth. Two years later, Alex has been looking into what happened to that

debt. What has your recent reporting revealed about Elon Musk's loans?

So the 13 billion... about Elon Musk's loans.

So the 13 billion that Elon Musk had X borrow to buy Twitter

is now considered the worst deal in merger finance that banks have participated in

since the 2008 to 9 financial crisis.

Welcome to the journal, our show about money, business and power. I'm Kate

Leimbaw. It's Tuesday, August 27th.

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