It seems like a really weird PE acquisition to me. Did they have iron-clad, shockingly lucrative data distribution contracts? The site still has a donate button

It seems like a really weird PE acquisition to me. Did they have iron-clad, shockingly lucrative data distribution contracts? The site still has a donate button on it as of this moment, and somewhere says something along the lines of “in the very unlikely event our revenues ever exceed our opex, all excess will be reinvested in the project.” One of the technical leads on the project said the site was generating between $500-3000 a day in revenue. It wasn’t clear if that was just ad revenue (which is a cash flow PE is definitely NOT buying) or ads + data subscriptions, but I just can’t imagine they bought much of substance here, when it sounds like the entire technical team has moved on. If the feeder network declines, what’s left? Stale flight data? Super weird investment.