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by gruez 591 days ago
>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 just means... equity that's private (ie. not on public markets). SpaceX is technically private equity. SoftBank's Vision Fund is private equity. There might be problems with those companies/funds, but "rapidly suck all the value out of businesses by loading them up with debt" is not one of them.
2 comments
CamperBob2 591 days ago
The implication, which is well understood, is that the "equity" in "private equity" exists in the form of investments in other companies by the PE business. No reasonable person would agree that ownership of one's own business counts as "private equity."

So SpaceX doesn't count at all. SoftBank, being a VC-like business aimed at speculation on new businesses rather than sacking and looting existing ones, is debatable.

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_1tem 591 days ago
No. That is not how language works. "Money laundering" does not mean putting paper bills into a washing machine. "Private equity" firms are a specific business structure besides the literal meaning.
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gruez 591 days ago
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Private_equity

"Private equity (PE) is stock in a private company that does not offer stock to the general public. "

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Money_laundering

"Money laundering is the process of illegally concealing the origin of money obtained from illicit activities such as [...]"

Seems like I'm using the terms properly, and you're trying to inject extra connotations. What you're doing with '"Private equity" firms are a specific business structure besides the literal meaning' is basically the same as loudly proclaiming "all cyclists are assholes" and then walking it back with 'No. That is not how language works. "cyclists" does not mean people riding bikes. When I use "cyclists" I don't actually mean all cyclists, only the bad ones.'

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Workaccount2 591 days ago
Everyone at the table understood what was meant by "private equity", the term has entered common parlance. Pulling out the dictionary just makes the "whoosh" sound even louder.
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gruez 590 days ago
So you'd be fine with statements like "cyclists are assholes", or maybe even "undocumented migrants are assholes"? After all, in both cases you could argue that you're not meant to take those groups literally, only the bad elements within those groups. This is even a pretty common refrain by some. ie. "oh I don't hate all migrants, just the ones that's causing trouble". Where do you draw the line between "it's fine to seemingly bash an entire group of people because everyone knows you're not literally bashing the entire group" and "false rhetoric"?
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