Illustration: Laura Normand / The Verge
“Elon [Musk]’s Twitter deal certainly must also rank as the most time-adjusted value-destructive leveraged buyout of all time,” says William Cohan, writing for Puck. While Musk has estimated Twitter’s value as $20 billion in a March 31st email to employees — meaning its value dropped by more than half after the $44 billion acquisition — Twitter’s actual value is even lower than that. The banks still own $13 billion of Twitter’s debt and can’t sell it for more than 50 cents on the dollar, Cohan says. “The destruction of $37.5 billion in value in less than six months must have set some sort of Wall Street record.”
Musk already biffed it with advertisers: revenue has fallen by half since October, Bloomberg reports. Historically, ads were…
