Private Equity Criticism

Has any private equity buyout ever helped anybody other than the PE stakeholders?

Private equity-owned [anything] puts profits over [everything].

You're getting the cause and effect backwards. Private equity generally buys companies that are already in rough shape and tries to turn them into something profitable (which often means a lot of cost cutting). That's an important part of the ecosystem. If anyone's harming society it's the VC ecosystem that gets companies hooked on free money and encourages them to burn it as fast as possible, blocking sustainable businesses from playing in that space.

This won't be at a 5yo level, but here's an attempt: there are a two things specific to private equity that often leads to higher prices and worsening service:1. PE aren't investors like you and me. We can go to our brokerage and buy shares of a public company, hold those shares, vote on directors and proposals, etc... Or we can buy and sell ETF/mutual fund shares that own companies. Then, we (or fund managers) can sell those shares after any period of time we want. Could

Private equity is cancer. It should be illegal. It adds nothing of value and just hollows out a company for short term profit-taking while hoping nobody notices how your restructure is laden with exploding debt.This will kill EA, period.IIRC I read the other day there are more private equity firms in the US than McDonald's now. We produce nothing but weapons now as well as financial chicanery like private equity.

PE is pretty much ruining everything: https://www.nytimes.com/2023/04/28/opinion/private-equity.ht...

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.

>The point of PE isn't to run sustainable businesses that provide quality products and services for customers while treating their employees well. The point is to rapidly suck all the value out of businesses by loading them up with debt, breaking laws, mistreating customers, and exploiting employees. What happens to the carcass of the business or to the customers and employees whose lives have been destroyed doesn't matter to them.This is an overly-broad statement. Private equity

^^^ this. Once private equity gets involved, things rarely improve for anyone except the PE company.

Not necessarily. One pattern of PE is to buy a company, make the company borrow money, spend that money on the PE firm's other interests, and then declare bankruptcy to discharge debts.https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Corporate_raidWikipedia has a nice overview of the topic of this thread:<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/History_of_private_equity