Brown doesn’t exist. I’m with you.

Yeah. I’ve been a part of two companies acquired by private equity, and the playbook is to cut all spending on employees through any means. Slow pay all vendors until they won’t work with you. Kill product development. Raise prices in predatory fashion. And… while the books briefly look good and before it all falls apart in a few years… sell to someone.

Both times, it did not work. Well, I guess it worked for whoever sold the company to private equity. And I guess the private equity installed leadership of tall confident sounding idiots made big salaries and bonuses, which is nice. I’m just not sure where the money came from. If I understand capitalism, it probably came from our taxes somehow.

I watch the YouTube channel “Company Man” that does a bunch of interesting business stories. 95% of the “Decline of (brand)” or “Rise and Fall of (brand)” videos are because of leveraged buyouts.

A group of idiots borrow billions of dollars, throw the unrecoverable debt onto the books, slowly killing the company, and then it’s dead.

Who loans this money? How does that work? I understand the rest of it about being a bastard who collects millions in salary and bonuses while driving a company into the ground. I just don’t understand where the money comes from, or why.