"We've Been Sold a Story That Isn't Remotely True": How Private-Equity Billionaires Killed the American Dream

[Celerity]

In her new book, Bad Company, journalist Megan Greenwell shows how the secretive industry has insinuated itself into average Americans’ lives.

https://www.vanityfair.com/news/story/megan-greenwell-bad-company-interview

https://archive.ph/Mdx01


EMERYVILLE, CA - MARCH 15: Customers leave a Toys R Us store on March 15, 2018 in Emeryville, California. Toys R Us filed for liquidation in a U.S. Bankruptcy court and plans to close 735 stores leaving 33,000 workers without employment. (Photo by Justin Sullivan/Getty Images)Justin Sullivan/Getty Images

In the canon of spectacular resignations, Megan Greenwell’s is up there. On her last day as editor in chief of the beloved sports blog Deadspin, Greenwell published a blistering essay on the site about her soon-to-be former bosses at the private-equity firm Great Hill Partners, which had acquired Deadspin and other former Gawker properties earlier in 2019. In the essay, Greenwell accused Great Hill of undermining Deadspin’s staff at every turn and seeking a “quick cash-out” on its investment.

And it wasn’t just happening at Deadspin, Greenwell explained: “A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart.” She’d written the post mostly for her own catharsis, Greenwell told Vanity Fair. But the response to it stunned her, as more than 1,000 messages poured in, many of them from readers who shared their own stories of how the private-equity industry had, in various ways, upended their lives too.

“It made me obsessive about reading about this, because I wanted to understand what had happened to me and to my coworkers and to my friends, and I realized that the only way to do that was by treating this as a reporting project,” Greenwell said. Nearly six years later, Greenwell has funneled what she learned into a new book, Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream.

The book is a deeply human account of the ways in which the multitrillion-dollar private-equity industry affected four different people: a Toys“R”Us supervisor who was laid off alongside the company’s 33,000 employees after the company declared bankruptcy following a private-equity acquisition; a rural doctor who watched private-equity ownership strip his Wyoming hospital of crucial services; a local reporter who helped lead union negotiations as private-equity-owned Gannett gutted newsrooms across the country; and an affordable-housing organizer whose own family suffered under a private-equity-industry landlord.

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