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Elon Musk privately told some of the bankers who lent him $13 billion to
fund his leveraged buyout of Twitter that they would not lose any money on
the deal, according to five people familiar with the matter.

The verbal guarantees were made by Musk to banks as a way to reassure the lenders as the value of the social media site, now rebranded as X, fell
sharply after he completed the acquisition last year.

Despite the assurances, the seven banks that lent money to the billionaire
for his buyout—Morgan Stanley, Bank of America, Barclays, MUFG, BNP
Paribas, Mizuho and Societe Generale—are facing serious losses on the debt
if and when they eventually sell it.

The sources did not specify when Musk's assurances were made, although one noted Musk had made them on several occasions. But the billionaire's
behavior, both in attempting to back out of the takeover in 2022 and more recently in alienating advertisers, has more broadly stymied the banks’
efforts to offload the debt since he engineered the takeover.

Large hedge funds and credit investors on Wall Street held conversations
with the banks late last year, offering to buy the senior-most portion of
the debt at roughly 65 cents on the dollar. But in recent interviews with
the Financial Times, several said there was no price at which they would
buy the bonds and loans, given their inability to gauge whether Linda Yaccarino, X's chief executive, could turn the business around.

One multibillion-dollar firm that specializes in distressed debt called
X's debt "uninvestable."

Selling the $12.5 billion of bonds and loans below 60 cents on the
dollar—a price many investors believe the banks would be lucky to achieve
in the current market—would imply losses before accounting for X's
interest payments of $4 billion or more, write downs that have not yet
been publicly reported by the syndicate of lenders, according to FT calculations. The debt is split between $6.5 billion of term loans, as
well as $6 billion of senior and junior bonds and a $500 million revolver.

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