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Notes -
Related to the Twitter-Musk saga, Elon tweeted:
https://twitter.com/elonmusk/status/1587129795732770824
"If I had a dollar for every time someone asked me if Trump is coming back on this platform, Twitter would be minting money!"
Then the obvious question is, if Musk owns the site, why can't he just bring Trump back? What or who is stopping him?
As it turns out, Prince Alwaleed has a large interest in Twitter and helped finance the deal:
Senate Democrat wants national security investigation of Saudi Arabia’s role in Elon Musk-Twitter deal
Alwaleed and Trump are not on good terms https://www.thewrap.com/saudi-prince-fires-back-at-donald-trump-over-alleged-photoshopped-picture/
And others helped too: https://www.cnbc.com/2022/05/05/oracle-co-founder-ellison-to-give-1-billion-to-fund-musks-purchase-of-twitter.html
and https://nypost.com/2022/10/25/elon-musk-may-close-44b-twitter-deal-by-friday-report/
So this is unfortunate. It could mean that Musk cannot unban him for fear of Alwaleed selling his stake, or some agreement between Musk and his financial backers to keep Trump banned.
Related to a theme that's been touched on in other recent Elowitter threads: the thing about Al Waleed specifically doesn't really bother me. There are many problems with the behavior of anglosphere media, but the biggest is that they consistently agree on what the correct Overton window is, with only small deviations. If Musk decides to censor criticism out of pettiness, or keep Trump off as a favor to Al Waleed, then these are all unfortunate, but a relatively small price to pay for breaking the alignment between Twitter's totally-not-censorship and everyone else's totally-not-censorship.
Of course, sometimes there'll be alignment---in this case there pretty clearly is with respect to Trump. But that's more of a coincidence than it was before, so as far as I'm concerned it represents a strict improvement.
More interesting/concerning to me is the implication that Morgan Stanley, BofA, etc. may have some ability to influence these decisions. Are there similar cases in the past of those banks being part of large deals (by financing the individual/corporation making the purchase), and then exerting meaningful control?
More directly, I'm not sure I believe even the claim that Al Waleed is influencing things. Isn't it more likely that Musk merely wishes to give the appearance of some sort of reasonable process---or even more, intends to use the Trump question as an early test of whatever process he intends to set up ("content moderation council" was suggested Friday but I can't find any more recent evidence that this is happening)? "Normal" timescales for setting up a meaningfully different moderation process would be what, 6 months or more? I don't think too much can be read into a delay of a couple weeks, and what I can read into it is reassuring. Restoring Trump has symbolic value, but provides little actual protection (particularly for non-Trump people) going forward. Setting up a moderation system that would not have banned him in the first place is far better.
Based on my limited professional experience as a risk manager covering lending to private equity deals, I would say that lenders have no meaningful input into management decisions at PE-owned companies as long as they are not in financial trouble. The loans will have covenants (something like "Twitter needs to maintain free cash flow three times the interest on the senior debt and a book debt-to-assets ration of less than 75%") with a provision to call the loans (which would require Musk to put in further billions of his own money to replace them with equity or put Twitter into Chapter 11 with the likely result of the banks ending up as the main equity holders) if they are breached. What usually happens if a PE-owned company breaches covenants is that the lenders (who don't want to become owners) use this right as leverage to take a closer look at the business and decide if they think it is salvagable. Given Musk's negotiating power viz-a-viz the banks, I assume the covenants on this deal will not be binding unless Twitter gets into very serious trouble.
The other equity contributors have whatever rights they negotiated (default is that Musk gets what he wants as majority owner). Non-selling existing shareholders like the Saudis have a weak negotiating position so they almost certainly have no control rights at all.
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