Executives at those companies understand that risk and set up all kinds of landmines to scare private equity away.

A simple example would be, they could put the IT support department under the "VP of Crypto" instead of under the "Director of IT". So private equity comes in and fires the entire crypto department because they assume it is useless and then find out that no one can get their passwords reset or computer replaced.

More complex examples involve finance. You could transfer stock in your company to a banker as collateral for a loan with the condition that if the loan is paid off early there is a 1 billion dollar fee. Taking a company private requires that the buyer buy all the public stock.