Doing the math on the Twitter deal

The comic strip Pearls Before Swine took aim at the financial situation that Elon Musk faces after purchasing Twitter.

(Pearls Before Swine)

(Pearls Before Swine)

As I understand it, Musk paid $44 billion for the purchase. $27 billion was put up by him and $4 billion by other investors, while $13 billion was borrowed. This is what is known as a ‘leveraged buyout’ in that it is the company that is being bought that borrows the money, not the buyer. So if the loans go into default, it is Twitter that is on the hook, not Musk personally. This strikes me as a bit weird but what do I know about high finance? It appears that the banks seem to think that Musk will not drive the value of Twitter below the $13 billion valuation so that they can recoup their loan even if things go south.
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Hey! Don’t forget The Pips!

The backup vocalists of singers are often overlooked. The excellent 2013 documentary 20 Feet From Stardom that I reviewed here some years ago focused on some of the people who provided the rich texture to many of the greatest pop songs but were largely anonymous.

I recently watched this documentary about the anonymous vocalists who sing backup for the featured musical stars, providing harmonies and visual excitement by dancing and swaying along with the music. In the 1950s and earlier, most of the backup singers were white women who sang more sedately and tended to follow the written music score.

But black women grew up singing in the gospel churches where improvising, harmonizing while dancing, and the ‘call and response’ form of preaching and singing provided a natural training for a more vibrant form of backup vocals. The people who utilized this most in the early days were the British rockers like the Rolling Stones and Joe Cocker who had discovered American blues music and found that these singers added an authenticity and energy to the music that they themselves did not have. They encouraged these women to let loose and give it all they got and they did, changing music forever. We then had backup singers being partially featured with groups like Diana Ross and the Supremes, Smokey Robinson and the Miracles, Tony Orlando and Dawn, Martha Reeves and the Vandelas, Gladys Knight and the Pips, and so on.

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Maybe we should be like Larry

The collapse of the cryptocurrency exchange FTX has been all over the news.

Cryptocurrency exchange FTX, which has filed for US bankruptcy court protection, said it owes its 50 biggest creditors nearly $3.1 billion.

The exchange owes about $1.45 billion to its top ten creditors, it said in a court filing on Saturday, without naming them.

FTX and its affiliates filed for bankruptcy in Delaware on Nov. 11 in one of the highest-profile crypto blowups, leaving an estimated 1 million customers and other investors facing total losses in the billions of dollars.

What seems to have happened is a lot like an old-fashioned bank run where too many depositors wanted their money back at the same time, exhausting the cash reserves of the company. But in the case of actual banks, they are regulated by the government and there are systems in place to assist individual banks weather such runs and protect depositors. In the unregulated crypto-world where they prided themselves on being independent of government entanglements, there are no such safeguards

The company has filed for bankruptcy and Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of FTX, has ben pushed out of the company and is now in the Bahamas.

The collapse of FTX has given a new lease of life for the ad the company aired during the last Super Bowl featuring Larry David.

The greed and savagery of the British monarchy

On the latest episode of his show Last Week Tonight, John Oliver takes a close look at the British royal family and takes apart the arguments given by those who think that the institution should continue. He also exposes the evasiveness and lack of responsibility taken by them for the horrors, including slavery, committed in their name over the centuries that enriched them and the UK so immensely. He walks us through the gruesome history of how the monarchy acquired their lands and wealth and then passed it down to their descendants. To add insult to injury, they also are exempt from paying most inheritance taxes, so that these layabouts can live a life of luxury on money that they have not worked for.

The verdict is in: Trump’s big announcement was boring

The general consensus about Trump’s speech announcing that he is running again was that it was long and boring. It did not help that he had telegraphed what he was going to say a long time ago. It also did not help that much of it was mostly a rehash of the speech he has been giving at rallies. The difference was that he was very low energy. This may have been deliberate in that he was trying to appear ‘presidential’ and reading from a teleprompter, which is not something that he does well. Or it may be because the audience was not the raucous crowds at his rallies that he seems to relish speaking to.

Even Fox News cut away from the speech and Rupert Murdoch’s New York Post had at the bottom of its front page the single line “Florida man makes announcement”. That must sting.

In contrast, the late night talk shows reviewing the speech were pretty funny.

Here is Jimmy Kimmel.

Here is Seth Meyers.

Funny comic strip

As we await the results of today’s election, here is one of the strips from Get Fuzzy, a daily comic strip by Darby Conley that has three main characters who live together in an apartment: a human Rob, a dog Satchel, and a cat Bucky. Rob is a nerdy single guy with apparently no social life who spends his spare time playing video games and is a fan of rugby. Satchel is naive, gullible, lovable but dim, while Bucky is devious, ignorant but thinks of himself as very smart, and is constantly scheming to find ways to make money and also torment Satchel.

I read the strip daily and decided to share this one to introduce it to people who might not have known about it. Sadly, Conley stopped producing new daily strips in 2013 and Sunday ones in 2019 but reruns appear every day and they have mostly a timeless quality and whatever current events that are alluded to that have become dated can be easily understood.

(Get Fuzzy)