A Horror Story: How Private Equity Vampires Are Killing Everything | Hacker News Reader

A Horror Story: How Private Equity Vampires Are Killing Everything

thenation.com

23 pointshoward9417 comments

Great podcast episode on the Deadspin thing and its relation to private equity.

https://soundcloud.com/chapo-trap-house/364-human-deadspinal...

As a non-native speaker the word equity has always been a little puzzling.

According to the first meanings defined by dictionary.com this article might be about characteristically private but virtuous vampires:

"noun, plural eq·ui·ties.

(1) the quality of being fair or impartial; fairness; impartiality: the equity of Solomon.

(2) something that is fair and just: the equities of our criminal-justice system."

Equity in the private equity sense refers to the financial term equity [1]. It should be contrasted with public equity, which is equity that is listed on an index which allows it to be purchased on the open market.

[1] Definition of equity

2a : the money value of a property or of an interest in a property in excess of claims or liens against it

b : the common stock of a corporation

c : a risk interest or ownership right in property

d : a right, claim, or interest existing or valid in equity

This was too full of rambling about actual vampires (hungarian legends and the like) and about the poor fashion sense of the newly rich, that you'll have to read at great length and with great focus in order to figure out if the article contains anything substantive about current events or current socioeconomic phenomena.

That's something I'm not willing to do.

That's only the first two paragraphs if you'd like to skip it.

So private equity buys a sports publication and see that they're not publishing anything related to sports, so they tell them "hey, please publish sports related articles" whereby the staff whines, quits, and is replaced? And this is a bad thing, how?

"[...] According to [Deadspin's] analytics department, since the start of the year, non-sports posts have on average double the traffic of sports posts."

- https://twitter.com/barry/status/1189942493355347973

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