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> Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors? If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability

> Has private equity ever done anything good for anyone outside of the investors? If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability. And while I'm increasingly hostile toward the shareholder model, we do get one transparency breadcrumb from this (gov managed) contrivance: The Earnings Call Earnings Calls give us worthwhile amounts of internal information that we'd never get otherwise - info that often conflicts with public statements and reports to govs. Like CapEx expenditures/forecast and the actual reasons that certain segments over/underperform. It's a solid way to catch corporations issuing bald-faced lies (for any press, public, gov that are paying attention). AT&T PR: Net Neutrality is tanking our infra investment ATT's EC: CapEx is high and that will continue I'll bet 1 share that there are moves to get this admin to do away with the requirement.

GolfPopper 11mo ago
>If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability. Under the existing legal and regulatory model, yes. But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse.
- JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
  > what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse The endpoint of vigilantism and collapse is more economic opacity. Not less. My personal view is companies with more than any of 1,000 employees, $10mm revenue or a $100mm valuation should have to file a simple annual disclosure showing the cap table ad balance sheet, a simple P/L, list of >5% beneficial owners and their auditor. But the path to that is through legislation in a complex, stable society.
  - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
    Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person. And how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company? In particular, how are you going to calculate it without making them do the thing you don't know if they're required to do without having the calculation already?
    - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
      > Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers My thinking was it should be simple to produce. Maybe for revenue only you eliminate the balance sheet and maybe P/L or cap table requirements. > how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company? I was thinking headline valuations, but you’re right. Skip valuation.
    - cycomanic 11mo ago
      > Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person. I'm not sure I understand your argument? Wages come out of revenue not income? So the $100k would go to the owners, but as captical gains not wages.
      - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
        It's a single-member LLC. The person doing the labor and the person who owns the company are the same person and whether they pay themselves the money as wages or dividends is not really the issue. A thousand employees is a business on the scale of a mid-sized bank or companies like VeriSign or LendingTree or Iridium Communications. Companies with something like a billion dollars in revenue. $10M in revenue is a small business.
        JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > It's a single-member LLC Maybe exempt pass-throughs?
- WarOnPrivacy 11mo ago
  > But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits After a couple of generations watching my government become increasingly captured by the lobbyists funding elections - I'm fairly skeptical that your optimistic assertion will come to pass. Doubly so now that capture is rapidly accelerating into a hostile, fascist takeover.
ineedasername 11mo ago
>I'll bet 1 share... I won't be your counterparty on that bet, you've already won: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/09/15/trump-wants-businesses-reporting-earnings-twice-a-year-instead-of-quarterly-reports/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/09/15/trump-wants... One of the reasons cited? All the work it takes. Which is just an insane response. If your business is so poorly run and organized that reconciling things each quarter represents a disproportionate amount of effort, something is very wrong. It means you definitely don't know what's going on, because by definition you can't know, not outside those 4 times a year. In which case there's a reasonable chance the requirement to do so is the only thing that's kept it from going off the rails.
- CamelCaseName 11mo ago
  There's a huge difference between internal and external reporting from an effort and benefit perspective.
- raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
  There is a huge difference between reconciling things for your own business strategy and reconciling things in accordance with federal public company reporting standards for publicly traded companies. These standards are different than IRS reporting.
  - ineedasername 11mo ago
    That doesn’t change anything: there isn’t anything in the reporting requirements that I can look at and say “that’s useless I wouldn’t want to know that about my business”
    - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
      There are entire classes in graduate school (I am an MBA dropout) that specifically focus on Management Accounting used to make internal decisions that are different than the accounting that you have to do for public accounting. I don’t care about the GAAP depreciation guidelines when I’m deciding something if my own internal metrics show that I can get twice the useful life out of equipment
EGreg 11mo ago
I'd even go so far as to say that shareholding in PUBLICLY TRADED companies is one of the primary engines of enshittification. Shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, full stop. And if the CEO isn't sociopathic enough about it, they’ll replace them with one who is. Everyone who buys shares at price X wants to sell at >X, forever. That incentive structure alone guarantees a race to the bottom. How to fix it: let shareholders be gradually bought out—much as slaveholders in Europe were—by (gasp) utility tokenholders. Think Shares in Disney Corp vs Disney Dollars. You transition from extractive shareholders to people who actually use and depend on the ecosystem. That eliminates the parasitic shareholder class that drives most of late-stage capitalist enshittification, rent extraction, and negative externalities. For clarity, here are just some of those externalities that flow directly from quarterly-earnings-driven incentives: destruction of ecosystems deforestation and rainforest loss collapse of fisheries and ocean systems factory farming / industrialized animal suffering desertification of farmland strip mining and toxic waste dumping privatization and depletion of freshwater carbon emissions and climate destabilization environmental injustice and poisoning of local communities lobbying to block regulation and accountability social media addiction design for engagement metrics monopolization and killing off smaller competitors offshoring, wage stagnation, and worker precarity financialization of everything (housing, healthcare, education) political capture to preserve the whole machine This is not some random accident, this is the inevitable equilibrium of shareholder primacy. The entire model of late-stage shareholding is flawed. Corporations exist because governments grant them charters. Government sets the rules for how shares work—and can change those rules. Buying shares is not like buying bonds. Shares are residual claims with far higher risk. So we can absolutely add another risk: that shareholders may be gradually bought out and the institution wound down, the same way the FDR administration forced private gold holders into a buyout under the Gold Reserve Act. That was far more authoritarian, because gold is a physical asset you own in self-custody. Shares, on the other hand, only exist because a third-party company continues to operate in ways that profit you. That dependency already implies higher risk. Therefore, we can add the additional risk of a structured, government-mandated transition away from extractive shareholder capitalism—just like Europe did when ending slavery. And let's be honest: late-stage financialized shareholding has been a blight on the planet. And none of this is historically radical. Before the modern era, the idea that shareholders should dominate everything simply didn’t exist. Pre-1960s:For much of the 20th century, a broader "stakeholder theory" was the norm. Management balanced employees, customers, suppliers, and communities—not just shareholders. 1960s:The turn began with Milton Friedman’s argument that a company’s only responsibility is maximizing shareholder profits (1970 NYT Magazine). 1980s:Shareholder primacy took over. Hostile takeovers forced boards into short-termism. Executive compensation was tied tightly to stock price. Financialization embedded all of this into corporate DNA. Shareholders were not always in control. Their dominance "waxed and waned," and the current form of shareholder primacy is a late-20th-century financial ideology posing as an eternal law of nature. If that ideology got us enshittification, ecological collapse, and a sociopathic corporate culture, then yes, we can fix it the same way other harmful institutions were fixed: buy the incumbents out and transition to a saner governance model.
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]

GolfPopper 11mo ago

>If it's not publicly traded, it's super secure from any public accountability. Under the existing legal and regulatory model, yes. But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse.

JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
> what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits, wide-spread vigilantism, and/or some sort of collapse The endpoint of vigilantism and collapse is more economic opacity. Not less. My personal view is companies with more than any of 1,000 employees, $10mm revenue or a $100mm valuation should have to file a simple annual disclosure showing the cap table ad balance sheet, a simple P/L, list of >5% beneficial owners and their auditor. But the path to that is through legislation in a complex, stable society.
- AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
  Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person. And how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company? In particular, how are you going to calculate it without making them do the thing you don't know if they're required to do without having the calculation already?
  - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
    > Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers My thinking was it should be simple to produce. Maybe for revenue only you eliminate the balance sheet and maybe P/L or cap table requirements. > how are you going to calculate valuation for a closely held private company? I was thinking headline valuations, but you’re right. Skip valuation.
  - cycomanic 11mo ago
    > Those are single-member LLC revenue numbers. You can get $10M in revenue just by being in a low-margin business. For industries with a 1% margin that's $100k a year in net income, i.e. wages and benefits for one person. I'm not sure I understand your argument? Wages come out of revenue not income? So the $100k would go to the owners, but as captical gains not wages.
    - AnthonyMouse 11mo ago
      It's a single-member LLC. The person doing the labor and the person who owns the company are the same person and whether they pay themselves the money as wages or dividends is not really the issue. A thousand employees is a business on the scale of a mid-sized bank or companies like VeriSign or LendingTree or Iridium Communications. Companies with something like a billion dollars in revenue. $10M in revenue is a small business.
      - JumpCrisscross 11mo ago
        > It's a single-member LLC Maybe exempt pass-throughs?
WarOnPrivacy 11mo ago
> But what abusing that model long-term will eventually result in government-level change that effectively bans the existence of such exploits After a couple of generations watching my government become increasingly captured by the lobbyists funding elections - I'm fairly skeptical that your optimistic assertion will come to pass. Doubly so now that capture is rapidly accelerating into a hostile, fascist takeover.

ineedasername 11mo ago

>I'll bet 1 share... I won't be your counterparty on that bet, you've already won: https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/09/15/trump-wants-businesses-reporting-earnings-twice-a-year-instead-of-quarterly-reports/ https://www.forbes.com/sites/saradorn/2025/09/15/trump-wants... One of the reasons cited? All the work it takes. Which is just an insane response. If your business is so poorly run and organized that reconciling things each quarter represents a disproportionate amount of effort, something is very wrong. It means you definitely don't know what's going on, because by definition you can't know, not outside those 4 times a year. In which case there's a reasonable chance the requirement to do so is the only thing that's kept it from going off the rails.

CamelCaseName 11mo ago
There's a huge difference between internal and external reporting from an effort and benefit perspective.
raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
There is a huge difference between reconciling things for your own business strategy and reconciling things in accordance with federal public company reporting standards for publicly traded companies. These standards are different than IRS reporting.
- ineedasername 11mo ago
  That doesn’t change anything: there isn’t anything in the reporting requirements that I can look at and say “that’s useless I wouldn’t want to know that about my business”
  - raw_anon_1111 11mo ago
    There are entire classes in graduate school (I am an MBA dropout) that specifically focus on Management Accounting used to make internal decisions that are different than the accounting that you have to do for public accounting. I don’t care about the GAAP depreciation guidelines when I’m deciding something if my own internal metrics show that I can get twice the useful life out of equipment

EGreg 11mo ago

I'd even go so far as to say that shareholding in PUBLICLY TRADED companies is one of the primary engines of enshittification. Shareholders want to extract rents from the ecosystem, full stop. And if the CEO isn't sociopathic enough about it, they’ll replace them with one who is. Everyone who buys shares at price X wants to sell at >X, forever. That incentive structure alone guarantees a race to the bottom. How to fix it: let shareholders be gradually bought out—much as slaveholders in Europe were—by (gasp) utility tokenholders. Think Shares in Disney Corp vs Disney Dollars. You transition from extractive shareholders to people who actually use and depend on the ecosystem. That eliminates the parasitic shareholder class that drives most of late-stage capitalist enshittification, rent extraction, and negative externalities. For clarity, here are just some of those externalities that flow directly from quarterly-earnings-driven incentives: destruction of ecosystems deforestation and rainforest loss collapse of fisheries and ocean systems factory farming / industrialized animal suffering desertification of farmland strip mining and toxic waste dumping privatization and depletion of freshwater carbon emissions and climate destabilization environmental injustice and poisoning of local communities lobbying to block regulation and accountability social media addiction design for engagement metrics monopolization and killing off smaller competitors offshoring, wage stagnation, and worker precarity financialization of everything (housing, healthcare, education) political capture to preserve the whole machine This is not some random accident, this is the inevitable equilibrium of shareholder primacy. The entire model of late-stage shareholding is flawed. Corporations exist because governments grant them charters. Government sets the rules for how shares work—and can change those rules. Buying shares is not like buying bonds. Shares are residual claims with far higher risk. So we can absolutely add another risk: that shareholders may be gradually bought out and the institution wound down, the same way the FDR administration forced private gold holders into a buyout under the Gold Reserve Act. That was far more authoritarian, because gold is a physical asset you own in self-custody. Shares, on the other hand, only exist because a third-party company continues to operate in ways that profit you. That dependency already implies higher risk. Therefore, we can add the additional risk of a structured, government-mandated transition away from extractive shareholder capitalism—just like Europe did when ending slavery. And let's be honest: late-stage financialized shareholding has been a blight on the planet. And none of this is historically radical. Before the modern era, the idea that shareholders should dominate everything simply didn’t exist. Pre-1960s:For much of the 20th century, a broader "stakeholder theory" was the norm. Management balanced employees, customers, suppliers, and communities—not just shareholders. 1960s:The turn began with Milton Friedman’s argument that a company’s only responsibility is maximizing shareholder profits (1970 NYT Magazine). 1980s:Shareholder primacy took over. Hostile takeovers forced boards into short-termism. Executive compensation was tied tightly to stock price. Financialization embedded all of this into corporate DNA. Shareholders were not always in control. Their dominance "waxed and waned," and the current form of shareholder primacy is a late-20th-century financial ideology posing as an eternal law of nature. If that ideology got us enshittification, ecological collapse, and a sociopathic corporate culture, then yes, we can fix it the same way other harmful institutions were fixed: buy the incumbents out and transition to a saner governance model.

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]