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Nonfiction

The Private Equity Wager: Heads We Win, Tails You Lose

Twelve million Americans work for companies owned by private equity
firms. In a new book, the journalist Megan Greenwell traces the
arrangement's considerable human costs.

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A photo of a room of workers at cubicles laden with laptops, monitors
and other office paraphernalia.
Employees at the website Deadspin in 2018, before it was sold to a
private equity firm. Megan Greenwell, the author of "Bad Company" and
Deadspin's editor at the time, is seated on the right, near the
window.Credit...John Taggart for The Washington Post, via Getty
Images
Jennifer Szalai

By Jennifer Szalai

July 2, 2025
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BAD COMPANY: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream, by
Megan Greenwell

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In 2019, Megan Greenwell had only a "vague sense" of how powerful
private equity had become. Sure, she had heard the stories about Toys
"R" Us, the beloved retailer that went bankrupt after private equity
firms bought out the company and saddled it with crushing amounts of
debt. "I knew private equity was a problem," she writes in her new
book, "Bad Company." "I just thought it wasn't my problem."

At the time, Greenwell was the editor of Deadspin, an online sports
magazine whose mix of investigative reporting and cheeky commentary
had attracted a devoted readership. But the magazine and its sister
sites were also losing $20 million a year. Enter a private equity
firm named Great Hill Partners to the rescue -- or not. Greenwell
recalls how Deadspin's new owners seemed determined to come up with
bad ideas that would run the website's brand into the ground. After
three months of being micromanaged, she resigned in disgust: "The
firm's goal was never to make our website better or grow its
readership. Great Hill Partners, and private equity at large, exists
solely to make money for shareholders, no matter what that means for
the companies it owns."

It's a business model that Greenwell writes about to potent effect in
"Bad Company," which emphasizes the human costs of private equity.
She says she started writing her book "not out of spite, but out of
pure curiosity." Why did Great Hill Partners flourish financially
after reducing Deadspin to a husk of its former self? (Last year the
site was sold to a Maltese gambling outfit that uses it to "drive
traffic to online casinos.") Shouldn't a private equity firm make
money when the company it buys makes money, and consequently lose
money when it doesn't? How could a firm continue to bring in revenue
while its acquisitions flounder? What is it like to work for a
company whose owners don't necessarily have its best interests at
heart?

Twelve million Americans work for companies owned by private equity,
which amounts to about 8 percent of the labor force. In "Bad
Company," Greenwell tells the stories of four people whose lives have
been upended by the industry. Liz Marin worked for six years at Toys
"R" Us; Roger Gose was a doctor in rural Wyoming; Natalia Contreras
was a journalist for a local paper in Texas; Loren DePina lived in a
private equity-owned apartment complex in Alexandria, Va. Their
stories share a similar arc: tentative hopefulness followed by a rude
awakening.

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