One Year On, Twitter Continues to Burn a Hole Through Bank Balance Sheets

The banks that financed Elon Musk’s $44 billion purchase of Twitter are still struggling a year later to contain the damage to their balance sheets.

Seven banks including Morgan Stanley, Bank of America and Barclays lent Musk around $13 billion to buy Twitter a year ago this coming Friday. Under normal circumstances, they would have unloaded the debt to Wall Street investment firms soon thereafter. But investor appetite for Twitter, which Musk has since renamed X, has cooled since the billionaire took over, forcing the banks to hold the debt on their own balance sheets at a discounted value.