Isn’t this a West Wing episode?
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Wait, why can’t you eat shellfish?
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Why does this matter? The whole point of an investment fund is that people with money (pension funds, etc.) don’t necessarily have investment expertise, so they create a fund where the people with money put in a lot of money and the people who manage the money manage the money. If the PE guys had enough money to fund their deals, they would be a family office and not a PE fund.
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This is another of those things that seem like they can’t possibly be true because they’re not true. The sponsor charges the investors a management fee. Fees that are charged by the manager to portfolio companies offset the management fee, so they benefit the investors. Or more accurately, they just move money from one pocket to another.
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This is just more stuff that’s not particularly true. It’s trivially right that the managers want to make the business worth more so they can make money on the deal (unless they’re Vision Fund?). But it’s not remotely true that the only way to do that is to fire people and slash investment. Certainly cost-cutting is a strategy that a fund might use to try to make a business more valuable, but hiring more people is also a thing you could do? I mean, why would the person you’re going to sell the company pay more because you fired all the critical employees and stopped making investments? The whole point of the scam in Goodfellas was that you exit via insurance fraud. If you had to sell the restaurant to a PE firm, the scam wouldn’t work because they wouldn’t pay you anything because the business had been looted.
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Don’t necessarily disagree with the tax point.
Bill fucking Burr man LOL
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https://twitter.com/jayrosen_nyu/status/1189886748056342528
Having the power to wreck a profitable business out of spite and face zero consequences for it must be fun.
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Aaron Sorkin coming out with microwaved hot takes
And right now, on your website, is an ad claiming that Joe Biden gave the Ukrainian attorney general a billion dollars not to investigate his son. Every square inch of that is a lie and it’s under your logo. That’s not defending free speech, Mark, that’s assaulting truth.
You and I want speech protections to make sure no one gets imprisoned or killed for saying or writing something unpopular, not to ensure that lies have unfettered access to the American electorate.
Even after the screenplay for “The Social Network” satisfied the standards of Sony’s legal department, we sent the script — as promised over a handshake — to a group of senior lieutenants at your company and invited them to give notes. (I was asked if I would change the name of Harvard University to something else and if Facebook had to be called Facebook.)
After we’d shot the movie, we arranged a private screening of an early cut for your chief operating officer, Sheryl Sandberg. Ms. Sandberg stood up in the middle of the screening, turned to the producers who were standing in the back of the room, and said, “How can you do this to a kid?” (You were 27 years old at the time, but all right, I get it.)
I hope your C.O.O. walks into your office, leans in (as she suggested we do in her best selling book), and says, “How can we do this to tens of millions of kids? Are we really going to run an ad that claims Kamala Harris ran dog fights out of the basement of a pizza place while Elizabeth Warren destroyed evidence that climate change is a hoax and the deep state sold meth to Rashida Tlaib and Colin Kaepernick?”
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The religious answer is “just because it says you can’t”.
I think maybe there’s a historical answer that the Jews and Philistines (I think it was them) weren’t so fond of each other at the time and the Philistines were sea faring shellfish eaters.
The funny part is the Philistines were worldly traders, whereas the Israelites lived up in the hills and didn’t have much contact with other groups. By any measure you can come up with (pottery, architecture) the Philistines had the more advanced culture. Yet we still use their name to this day as a pejorative for crude and unsophisticated.
It’s like if California fell into the sea and Arkansas got to write the final historical record of 1900s-2000s America.
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Go suck on a prawn you Philistine!
Aaron Sorkin from the top rope!
I’m a sucker for “lean in” jokes.
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So it’s not Univision’s debt - it’s the the LLC that exists solely to own Univision’s debt. Do I have that right?
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Kudos to sorkin. Although I blame him for mythologizing Zuckerberg in the first place.
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The Social Network brutalized Zuck way back when people actually liked him and Facebook.
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Your pony linked the wrong article imo
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Yes and it was old and grandpa’s balls at that time
Isn’t everything?
It owns Univision, not the debt.
No I was posting a link to meat story and comment on previously posted sorkin story.
This is what I get for trying to do two things in one post. Back to one post one thought for me.
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Bob,
Forget about the details. Consider the whole process where some outside investors create a new organization (LLC or whatever) to purchase a poorly performing company, borrow money, lay people off, perhaps sell assets, and quite possibly leave some residue of the company to go into bankruptcy or whatever happens. Why does this happen? Who does it benefit? Is it even better for the shareholders generally than the company itself doing the layoff, selling assets, and so on? Does it just benefit a certain class of stockholder? Does it disproportionately benefit management? Do banks prefer to lend this money to some “vulture capitalist” group as opposed to the business itself without any kind of buyout? Is there some tax reason why this process is better for stockholders? Are the “vulture capitalists” capitalizing on having less liability and using that to make the whole thing more profitable (or less of a loss) for stockholders?
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