How Private Equity Destroys the Companies You Depend On

Chances are high that you’ve heard about the way that “private equity” has acquired, hollowed out, and bankrupted some service, product, or company you depend on. For years, I understood the work of private equity only in the vaguest terms — that it was bad, and that it f*cked stuff up. I had to learn a lot more when I was writing Can’t Even, because private equity acquisitions are one of many reasons work has become a burnout factory for so many. But I didn’t fully understand the breadth and the depth of private equity’s impact on our current economy until reading Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company — which she started writing after resigning from her position of editor-in-chief of Deadspin after private equity acquired the site and began excavating and eliminating the very core of what it made it work.

In today’s episode, Megan joins me to answer your questions about how private equity actually works, how it affects industries, what companies it’s historically targeted and who it’s targeting now (hello, dental and vet care!) This episode will make you feel like you understand a structuring reality of our culture better — and will also help you understand why so many experiences and services just feel shittier. It’s a hellscape of an episode but a deeply enlightening one!

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Show Notes:

• Buy Bad Company here!

• Follow Megan on Instagram here

• Megan’s now-canonical piece on “The Adults in the Room,” published on Deadspin after Megan tendered her resignation, discussing what private equity had done to the site

• Details on how private equity killed Toys R Us

• A good overview of private equity’s effects on vet care and an NPR examination of high suicide rates amongst vet professionals

• On Walgreens’ acquisition by private equity and the future of pharmacy care

• The Stop Wall Street Looting Act

We’re currently looking for your questions for future episodes about:

• The evolution of internet slang (and how it’s affected how you speak offline, too)

• The intersection of technology and parenting (especially how mothers are surveilled)

• REGIONAL ACCENTS!!!! (We have a accent/dialect expert as co-host!)

• Sabrina Carpenter????

• Book trends right now

• Fiction concierge!! Much like our old movies episode, let us know a few books you read and loved as well as whatever other parameters you want to put in place, and Maris Kreizman and I will make some recs!

• Anything you need advice or want musings on for the AAA segment. You can ask about anything, it’s literally the name of the segment!

• As always, you can submit them (and ideas for future eps) here

For this week’s discussion: What did this discussion illuminate re: private equity? And what service/product/store has it decimated (in your life?)

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