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Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
A timely work of singular reportage and a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers.
Private equity runs our country, yet few Americans have any idea how ingrained it is in their lives. Private equity controls our hospitals, daycare centers, supermarket chains, voting machine manufacturers, local newspapers, nursing home operators, fertility clinics, and prisons. The industry even manages highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services, and owns a growing swath of commercial and residential real estate.
Private equity executives, meanwhile, are not only among the wealthiest people in American society, but have grown to become modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation. CEOs of firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, and Apollo are rewarded with seats in the Senate and on the boards of the country's most august institutions; meanwhile, entire communities are hollowed out as a result of their buyouts. Workers lose their jobs. Communities lose their institutions. Only private equity wins.
Acclaimed journalist Megan Greenwell's Bad Company unearths the hidden story of private equity by examining the lives of four American workers that were devastated as private equity upended their employers and communities: a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and an affordable housing organizer. Taken together, their individual experiences also pull back the curtain on a much larger project: how private equity reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security.
In the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond's Evicted, Megan Greenwell pulls back the curtain on shadowy multibillion dollar private equity firms, telling a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream itself. Timely and masterfully told, Bad Company is a forceful rebuke of America's most consequential, yet least understood economic forces.
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Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
A timely work of singular reportage and a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers.
Private equity runs our country, yet few Americans have any idea how ingrained it is in their lives. Private equity controls our hospitals, daycare centers, supermarket chains, voting machine manufacturers, local newspapers, nursing home operators, fertility clinics, and prisons. The industry even manages highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services, and owns a growing swath of commercial and residential real estate.
Private equity executives, meanwhile, are not only among the wealthiest people in American society, but have grown to become modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation. CEOs of firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, and Apollo are rewarded with seats in the Senate and on the boards of the country's most august institutions; meanwhile, entire communities are hollowed out as a result of their buyouts. Workers lose their jobs. Communities lose their institutions. Only private equity wins.
Acclaimed journalist Megan Greenwell's Bad Company unearths the hidden story of private equity by examining the lives of four American workers that were devastated as private equity upended their employers and communities: a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and an affordable housing organizer. Taken together, their individual experiences also pull back the curtain on a much larger project: how private equity reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security.
In the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond's Evicted, Megan Greenwell pulls back the curtain on shadowy multibillion dollar private equity firms, telling a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream itself. Timely and masterfully told, Bad Company is a forceful rebuke of America's most consequential, yet least understood economic forces.
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Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
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A timely work of singular reportage and a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers.
Private equity runs our country, yet few Americans have any idea how ingrained it is in their lives. Private equity controls our hospitals, daycare centers, supermarket chains, voting machine manufacturers, local newspapers, nursing home operators, fertility clinics, and prisons. The industry even manages highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services, and owns a growing swath of commercial and residential real estate.
Private equity executives, meanwhile, are not only among the wealthiest people in American society, but have grown to become modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation. CEOs of firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, and Apollo are rewarded with seats in the Senate and on the boards of the country's most august institutions; meanwhile, entire communities are hollowed out as a result of their buyouts. Workers lose their jobs. Communities lose their institutions. Only private equity wins.
Acclaimed journalist Megan Greenwell's Bad Company unearths the hidden story of private equity by examining the lives of four American workers that were devastated as private equity upended their employers and communities: a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and an affordable housing organizer. Taken together, their individual experiences also pull back the curtain on a much larger project: how private equity reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security.
In the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond's Evicted, Megan Greenwell pulls back the curtain on shadowy multibillion dollar private equity firms, telling a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream itself. Timely and masterfully told, Bad Company is a forceful rebuke of America's most consequential, yet least understood economic forces.
Journalist Greenwell debuts with a scathing indictment of private equity. Profiling individuals whose lives were upended by such firms, she recounts how private equity’s takeover of Toys “R” Us in 2005 led to staffing cuts that forced one Oregon floor supervisor to take on responsibilities previously covered by three employees until the company went bankrupt in 2017 and refused to pay her severance. Examining private equity’s disastrous forays into the real estate industry, Greenwell details how one tenant’s efforts to force the firm that owned the Virginia apartment complex she lived in to fix the building’s mold and rodent problems resulted in her family’s eviction under a dubious pretense. Such stories outrage, but Greenwell finds reason for hope in ordinary people pushing back against private equity’s worst abuses, describing, for instance, how a Wyoming physician frustrated by Apollo Global Management’s winnowing of vital services at his hospital opened his own medical care facility to serve rural clientele with few alternative options. Greenwell also provides sound suggestions for reining in private equity, proposing legislation “requiring firms to stick with a company in order to make a profit instead of selling off its assets and shutting it down.” The result is a stark reminder of the human toll of corporate penny pinching. Agent: Anna Sproul-Latimer, Neon Literary. (June)
From the Publisher
An absolutely riveting tour of the American economic system, told through the lives of four people whose jobs were swallowed by the beast we call private equity. Greenwell has single-handedly exposed the hidden economic machine that increasingly runs—and ruins—our lives. This bombshell of a book is indispensable to understand the economic forces running roughshod over America today.” — Christopher Leonard, New York Times bestselling author of Kochland and The Lords of Easy Money
“In Bad Company, one of our finest journalists embarks on a harrowing, humane inquiry into the state of American business and comes away with a classic statement on 21st century culture. It’s wonderful.” — Zachary D. Carter, New York Times bestselling author of The Price of Peace
“A hard and eloquent look at players who have far too long escaped public scrutiny.” — Eliza Griswold, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of Amity and Prosperity and Circle of Hope
“With clear-eyed writing and honed investigative chops, Greenwell lays bare the private equity industry’s utter contempt for the rest of us. This is a book for this moment, a kind of cri de coeur. Reading these deeply reported tales left me shaking with anger.” — Alex Kotlowitz, award-winning author of There Are No Children Here and An American Summer
“Urgent and revelatory, Megan Greenwell leads us deep into the opaque world of private equity, where billion-dollar firms quietly seize control of the institutions and services we rely on. With wit, ferocity, and razor-sharp insight, Greenwell transforms what could be a dry financial story into a gripping mystery: how do these firms generate massive returns even as the businesses they buy collapse? Who, exactly, is cashing in on the wreckage? The result is both infuriating and galvanizing, a tour de force of investigative journalism that makes the harms of private equity not just legible but visceral.” — Brian Goldstone, author of There Is No Place for Us
“A beautifully written debut that takes a mostly abstract concept—private equity—and drills down to the human level, showing how a hyper-focus on profit is making life harder for everyone and destroying wide swaths of American life. The result is a crucial read that you won’t want to put down.” — Roxanna Asgarian, award-winning author of We Were Once a Family
