Book Review: Veteran journalist explores impact of private equity industry on US society
Megan Greenwell was the editor in chief of Deadspin when it was acquired in 2019 by a Boston-based private equity firm. The big names are Blackstone, the Carlyle Group, Apollo Global Management, KKR and Cerberus Capital Management. But what, she wondered, do they actually do? The result of her inquiry is “Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream,” a deeply reported, briskly paced and highly disturbing account of how the private equity industry has “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.”