Private equity is one of the most valuable functions of a market based economy, and that's understating its importance. To say the head of a private equity firm serves no purpose, is to claim allocating private capital in a market economy needs nobody in charge of that process at the company doing it.
Nearly all venture capital is private equity. Sam Altman is the President of a private equity company.
Private equity is not about concentrating capital, it's about allocating capital to productive use. It's no more vile than the stock market, which allocates capital from investors during the IPO process and afterward through the common purchase of shares.
Further, your comparison about slavery is obviously entirely false. An angel investor - aka private equity investor - like say Mark Cuban, who owns his own investment company and is the head of it, is not performing a function similar to slavery. Mark's capital is his own, and it was not stolen from people held in slavery by force. There is no similarity, and one cannot simply say they're similar because slavers were re-allocating capital too, that would be an intentionally nonsensical comparison.
This is why I wrote in paranthesis that I am talking about refashioned lbo firms, not vc firms. I am talking about KKR, Bain Capital (not Bain Ventures), Blackstone and the like. I am NOT talking about firms like Kleiner Perkins and Sequoia.
Then why not say leveraged buyout firms, since your issue is with an exceptionally small segment of private equity, instead of referring in general terms to private equity (and PE CEOs) across your entire post?
Having a good understanding of what KKR does, I fail to see how they're so bad. Most of KKR's deals have involved voluntary buyouts, which were then spun back off and voluntarily purchased by other investors. Almost all of the deals that made them famous in the 1980s were friendly deals.
Can you give me a better understanding, in a short summary, of why KKR is so terrible?
Private equity is one of the most valuable functions of a market based economy, and that's understating its importance. To say the head of a private equity firm serves no purpose, is to claim allocating private capital in a market economy needs nobody in charge of that process at the company doing it.
Nearly all venture capital is private equity. Sam Altman is the President of a private equity company.
Private equity is not about concentrating capital, it's about allocating capital to productive use. It's no more vile than the stock market, which allocates capital from investors during the IPO process and afterward through the common purchase of shares.
Further, your comparison about slavery is obviously entirely false. An angel investor - aka private equity investor - like say Mark Cuban, who owns his own investment company and is the head of it, is not performing a function similar to slavery. Mark's capital is his own, and it was not stolen from people held in slavery by force. There is no similarity, and one cannot simply say they're similar because slavers were re-allocating capital too, that would be an intentionally nonsensical comparison.