1. That’s Apollo the private equity firm, not the app

2. There’s a lot of finance jargon in this story to get through, but tl;dr the staggeringly corrupt Trump administration ripped us all off to help out their rich assholes friends and there’s no plan to hold them accountable for it

The Trump administration, which lobbied for and approved the loan [from the federal government], had ties to Apollo. One of its founders, Josh Harris, was an advisor to the White House on infrastructure policy. Apollo also lent Jared Kushner’s real estate company $184 million to refinance a Chicago office tower it owned. Harris and Kushner met multiple times.

The pretext for Yellow acquiring the loan was that the company allegedly represented almost 70 percent of the Defense Department’s small-freight shipping and services to the Department of Homeland Security and U.S. Customs and Border Protection. Those numbers proved to be loaded, according to a congressional oversight report from Rep. French Hill (R-AR) published at the end of June. It found that Yellow accounted for only 20 to 40 percent of the Defense Department’s small-freight shipping. For this reason, career Defense Department staff recommended that the loan be denied, but a June 2020 call between Treasury Secretary Steve Mnuchin and Defense Secretary Mark Esper led to Esper certifying the company as “critical to national security.”

While the government’s equity stake, which led Boeing to decline the option, was seen as a way to capture profits if Yellow thrived, the government loan was actually junior to Apollo’s term loan, something Hill told The Wall Street Journal and the Prospect separately confirmed. It was also junior to the revolving line of credit.

So if the business collapsed, Apollo and other creditors would be able to take the proceeds from liquidation before the government. As Adam Levitin, a law professor at Georgetown University, told the Prospect, “the 30 percent equity stake gave Treasury upside if things went well. It just wasn’t well protected for the downside.”

To date, Yellow has made $68 million in interest payments to Treasury on the loan, but has only made one payment of principal for the whopping amount of $230.

The Treasury loan, at LIBOR plus 350 basis points, was cheaper than Apollo’s. But instead of Yellow using it to get out of the arrangement with Apollo, it spent more than half of it, the second tranche of $400 million, on a new vehicle fleet, a curious proposition for a company mired in debt. (It also rebranded from YRC to Yellow in the middle of all this.) As Levitin wrote at his blog Credit Slips, “That’s not payroll protection or national security. That’s just subsidization of a favored company … For $400M, Treasury could have financed the purchase of a sizable freight fleet solely for military use, rather than subsidized a privately owned company that provides some of its services to the military.”

Those actions by yellow and the Treasury department are stupid to a highly suspicious degree, I’d love to see what a couple of subpoenas from the DOJ could shake out