James Coulter has a net worth of around $3 billion. He didn’t invent anything. He didn’t cure a disease. He didn’t build a product people love.
He got rich the old-fashioned private equity way: by buying companies with other people’s money, loading them with debt, firing workers, and cashing out before everything collapses.
Meet the man who turned human suffering into a business model. Private equity is legalized looting dressed up in a nice suit. Here’s how it works:
You find a company that’s doing okay. Maybe it employs thousands of people. Maybe it’s been around for decades. Maybe it’s the backbone of a small town’s economy.
Then you borrow a ton of money to buy it.
Here’s the trick: you don’t pay back that debt. The company does. You just bought a house and made the house pay the mortgage.
Now the company is drowning in debt it didn’t ask for. So what do you do? You cut costs. And by “costs,” we mean people. Their jobs. Their pensions. Their healthcare. Their dignity.
You pocket millions in fees just for showing up. You pay yourself dividends from the company’s cash reserves. And when you eventually sell or the company goes bankrupt, you walk away richer.
The workers? They get a cardboard box and a security escort
Written by AI or not, the facts aren’t wrong. It’s exactly how this shit works. We should be ending private equity companies.
There’s a question of how to do that, or at least how to best stop destructive business practices, and related to that, how these strategies work and where the money is coming from. From the explanation given here it sounds like their answer is, the bank loaning the money gets ripped off and left with a worthless company. Which seems a little implausible and needs more explanation about why that is possible as a common trend. But since I keep seeing GPTisms, I’m thinking maybe that detail was slightly off in some important way, because the writing is LLM approximation bullshitting.
Anyway it’s just frustrating because this topic is interesting to me but there isn’t any real information here that can reasonably be relied on.