I haven’t double-checked this, but if the financial backers of the LBO (i.e. the people to whom Twitter owes $44 billion) are seasoned private-equity types, it would make sense that they would advise him to do all the things LBOs always do, namely burning down the company for the insurance money (figuratively), by which I mean asset-stripping and flipping the empty husk on a new public listing.

A problem with this approach here is that, unlike, say, a department store chain, Twitter doesn’t have, say, several billion dollars’ worth of underutilized commercial real estate ripe for the picking.

(Though in the case of said department store chain, the usual outcome is that the empty husk goes bankrupt and is reorganized as being owned by its creditors, which is why all the dying mall stores have ended up being owned by their landlords.)

The outcome I’m hoping for is that Elon staves off the creditors by making in-kind interest payments of his own Tesla stock, so that in the end he owns Twitter outright instead of Tesla.