Tag: private equity

  • These are desperate and flailing words.

    Brian Merchant (whose excellent book Blood in the Machine I’m almost finished reading) writes a short, succinct, and jargon-free takedown of the brainworms-infected Andreessen manifesto from today (here’s the link: I read it and I feel dumber for having done so).

  • Private Equity-izing A24

    Maybe it was always going to be this way — A24 to expand, produce more commercial films. Private Equity bought a chunk of the company at a high valuation, now A24 has to figure out how to justify it. Prepare for Everything Everywhere All At Once Again and Again, I guess.

  • Conspicuous Destruction by Kim Phillips-Fein in NYRB

    Barnburner of an essay from Kim Phillips-Fein in NYRB on the issues with private equity, and also an interview with her about the essay. I read one of the books she talks about — These are the Plunderers — and liked it much more than I expected to. It wasn’t the anti-capitalist rant I thought…

  • These are the Plunderers: How Private Equity Runs—and Wrecks—America by Gretchen Morgenson and Joshua Rosner

    I read a lot of ‘capitalists behaving badly’ books, and this was stunning even by those standards. It’s an interesting companion to The Big Myth in that it details exactly how wealthy private equity convinces governments and regulators that it’s a force for good in the world, while that’s only true for the bank balances of…