SB, aka Bandy, closed the last Town Hall with a sort of “Trust me, bro” line.
Fitting, because that’s basically the financial strategy right now: trust us while we borrow new money to pay old debt and hope nobody asks why the interest bill keeps climbing.
Xerox isn’t running a literal Ponzi scheme, but the behavior rhymes: fresh debt replaces maturing debt, each round more expensive than the last, with no cash flow to reduce anything on its own.
Let's not forget some of SB's “stellar” performances in this Ponzi-like scheme:
In September 2023, SB borrowed $500M to buy back from his lord and master Carl Icahn (a legendary activist investor who had fallen on hard times and was wrong not by decimal points but by several orders of magnitude in his calculations to buy HP) his stake in Xerox;
In late 2024, SB borrowed another $220M to buy ITSavvy, the company then and nowadays run by a friend of the now-departed COO John B (still a board member though);
(Meanwhile, days later, SB indulged the whims of the also now-departed Chief Disruption Officer and wasted $10-20M on sponsoring the Aston Martin Aramco Formula 1 team, which wouldn't even win a Hot Wheels toy car race)
- And even though 2024 wasn't over yet, SB had time to plan how to borrow more money to acquire (well, rather than “acquire”, I would say “pay to be managed by”) Lexmark: close to $1B of extra liabilities for a company that lost about $740M last year.
SB & Friends claim they’ll pull out $200–300M in “synergies” by cutting overlapping functions, closing facilities, and shrinking corporate overhead.
Without those savings, the debt load gets heavier, interest expense keeps rising, and refinancing becomes harder. It’s that simple.
SB & Friends keep repeating the synergy story like it’s guaranteed.
It isn’t.
It requires flawless execution, discipline, and no surprises—things they know very little about.
Meanwhile, the core business is falling off a cliff. The only thing keeping this train moving is access to credit markets and the hope that lenders keep buying the story.
So yes: when the CEO says “Trust me, bro”, what he’s really saying is: “You are going to take a leap of faith and BELIEVE that the cuts will be implemented quickly, revenues will stop declining, and lenders will continue to be friendly”.
Except the lenders are not staying friendly anymore. S&P Global Ratings just cut Xerox’s credit rating to CCC+.
For those unfamiliar with S&P credit ratings: on a scale of 22, with 1 being “Prime” and 22 being “Lousy” (default, no money to pay bills anymore), CCC+ is 18.
S&P are also warning Xerox will burn $170–200M in cash this year and carry a debt load more than 7.5 times our earnings.
Put it in the simplest terms possible: the rating agency thinks we’re borrowing money just to stay alive, and that if anything goes wrong — if synergies slip, if revenue drops, if refinancing gets delayed — the whole structure can fall apart faster than any PowerPoint slide can explain.
At this point, the person who says "Trust me, bro" is in fact the last person you should trust.