The PE firms who bought Toys "R" Us put up $1.3b of their own money to do it. After they bought it, they did, yes, extract some handsome returns in fees and sal

The PE firms who bought Toys "R" Us put up $1.3b of their own money to do it. After they bought it, they did, yes, extract some handsome returns in fees and salaries; by the time Toys "R" US went under in 2018, it paid its PE masters several hundred million; Bloomberg has the number as $470m all up (https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-19/bain-kkr-vornado-suffer-wipeout-in-toys-r-us-bankruptcy https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2017-09-19/bain-kkr-...). Certainly a case can be made that those fees, given how poorly Toys "R" Us was doing, were ridiculous. However, if you buy something for $1.3b of your own money, extract a bit less than $500m in fees, and then drive it into bankruptcy, zeroing out your investment, you haven't come out ahead, and in fact have made a major loss. Even to the extent that PE and LBOs are about looting companies at the expense of other stakeholders (which is debatable). Toys "R" Us is a pretty clear example of PE firms selecting a target in a dying line of business and getting burned. (It's worth noting that large toy chains have been flaming out globally. In most countries the large chains have either gone under or are closing stores rapidly. If a bunch of large toy store chains are having issues, but only one was bought by PE, what's the common factor here?)