PRIVATE LIES.(The Talk of the Town)

Publication: The New Yorker

Publication Date: 28-AUG-06

Bookmark this article Print this article Link to this article Email this article Digg It! Add to del.icio.us RSS

COPYRIGHT 2006 All rights reserved. Reproduced by permission of The Condé Nast Publications Inc.

In the late nineteen-nineties, every bright young entrepreneur with a startup was dying to take his company public. In a time of generous stock options and irrationally optimistic markets, I.P.O.s seemed to offer a reliable road to riches. But lately the opposite approach--taking a company private--has become popular. Since the beginning of 2005, nearly a hundred top-level executives at public companies have participated in management buyouts, or M.B.O.s, joining private-equity investors to buy their companies from shareholders. In just the past month, a team led by the C.E.O. of the food-service provider Aramark undertook to buy the company at a cost of $8.3 billion, while at H.C.A.--the hospital chain founded by the father and brother of Senate Majority Leader Bill Frist--private equity firms and the Frist family announced a deal to buy that company, for...

Read the full article for free courtesy of your local library.