Bad Company
Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
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- $12.99
Publisher Description
*ONE OF AV CLUB'S BEST BOOKS OF 2025*
"[An] indictment of an industry that has cannily tilted the playing field in its favor. Bad Company details how clichéd abstractions like ‘consolidation’ and ‘efficiency’ have given cover to real betrayals.” - The New York Times
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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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.
