Comment by toast0
2 years ago
Private Equity is a scapegoat business. Like Ticketmaster.
If you have a company that's been slowly failing for a while, PE is here to help you out.
They will pay you money today and take over the company and in 3-5 years it will go out of business in a convincing way. And PE will take the heat.
That belies that fact that the play is usually to finance a bunch of debt to prop it up, pay themselves PHAT bonuses, and then let it burn to the ground. Honestly, it's gotten way past tiring that the government continues to let this same scenario play out over and over and over again.
Well, they have to make money somehow. You can't just buy a failing business, run it into the ground completely, and take the blame without being compensated.
If these businesses had a promising future, the owners would have been less interested in selling, someone interested in actually operating the business would have made an offer, or it could have been publicly traded.
Eh, PE also takes over businesses where the owners just want to cash out. Plenty of businesses too small to IPO but plenty of revenue to sell to PE.