Which in some cases means the general public via IPO.
I think we’re about to find out real quick who is actually good at business and who was just shuffling cheap leveraged money around trying to look important and smart.
Sounds like a prescient proxy for AI vs humans.
You're talking more about VC tech firms.
These distressed PE targets loaded with debt are often sold to another private buyer, or if they are taken public (sometimes not for the first time) they are much too small or have too bad of financials to be in the indexes that regular people are buying.
Investment banks are always involved in the IPO. That's not going to get Wonder into the Russell 1000 or anything like that.