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Blackstone’s flagship private credit fund just had investors ask for 7.9% back in a quarter. That’s not “a little noise.” That’s people reaching for the door handle at the exact moment the industry keeps telling everyone the doors are “always open.” In normal person terms: imagine
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I keep seeing this new species in private equity: the Operating Model Influencer. Always “rolling out the platform”. Always “standardising value creation”. Always one Notion workspace away from operational excellence. It usually comes with three archetypes: The Playbook Peddler Arrives with a 74 page PDF called “The Playbook”. Leaves before
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Local autonomy is what people demand when HQ starts “adding value”. Most multi site businesses die somewhere in the middle, crushed under a beautiful PowerPoint called “The Playbook” that nobody follows, because it has no teeth and even less respect for reality. Here’s the quadrant nobody wants to admit
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Apollo’s note basically admits what most of us have watched since 2022: a lot of firms mistook cheap debt and multiple expansion for talent. When rates reset, the returns didn’t just wobble. They exposed who was riding beta and who actually knows how to build businesses.  A few
News
GIP and EQT Close In on $40 Billion AES Take-Private BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT are in advanced talks to take AES Corp. private in a deal worth roughly $40 billion including debt, which would make it one of the largest infrastructure buyouts ever. The driver is
Deals
BlackRock GIP and EQT Target Clean Energy Assets from AES BlackRock’s Global Infrastructure Partners and EQT are circling clean energy assets tied to AES at a moment when renewable valuations have reset hard. After the 2025 drop off, private equity is not retreating. It is re underwriting. The math
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Private equity keeps hiring “value creation” people, then sends them into portfolio companies with zero mandate, zero budget, and the authority level of a polite email. And then everyone acts confused when the plan doesn’t happen. Obvious value creation: We underwrote 300 bps of margin expansion from “procurement synergies.
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That’s the whole game. You ask for growth. They pick the metric that moves fastest and connects to cash slowest. Suddenly the weekly update is a victory lap because CTR is up. Or CPM is down. Or “engagement” is strong. Or leads are “cheaper”. None of which tells you
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They fail because integration was treated as a future problem. The pitch always sounds the same. Buy fragmented assets. Centralise back office. Unlock synergies. Scale. What gets skipped is the hard part. How these businesses actually work once they’re stitched together. Different pricing logic. Different sales behaviours. Different tech
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Translation for anyone still clinging to 2016: the deal doesn’t work unless you actually run the business. Awful, I know. A decade ago, a “typical” buyout could hit a 2.5x over five years with ~5% annual EBITDA growth because leverage was fat and multiple expansion did the heavy
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It’s what people say when they haven’t done the hard part, which is deciding who actually owns the outcome, what “good” looks like, and what happens when it doesn’t show up. This is the incentives problem in four squares. Top right is grown up capitalism. Clear targets.
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I asked a model to launch a $2B services roll up. It named the fund, designed the logo, scraped every founder over 55 within a 50 mile radius of a metro with above average household income, and ranked them by “succession anxiety score.” It built the investment committee memo before