In the world of money managers and big capital, anything that doesn’t belong to the ultrawealthy is a temporary inconvenience, an aberration waiting and begging to be set right. Private equity (PE) specializes in using its immense hordes of capital, leverage, and networks to buy up everything in sight before jacking up prices, lowering service standards, stripping companies of assets, or some combination of the above. It’s a cynical and destructive strategy, and those behind it don’t care what it costs you. Indeed, costing is the whole idea for private equity’s depredations. If they don’t get to you one way, they’ll get to you another.

Short of a book-length disquisition on the subject, it’s impossible to properly catalog the extent to which PE’s extractive proboscises have inserted themselves into the infrastructure of our day-to-day lives. But a quick roundup of some of its more nefarious greatest hits can give some sense of PE’s scale: operators are dipping their fingers into the tens of billions in taxpayer dollars spent on nursing homes every year, and studies show that homes in which they’ve invested have higher mortality rates and lower standards of care. PE has helped push aside the nonprofits that used to oversee youth sport, where families have seen a 46 percent cost increase for their child’s primary sport since 2019. Through “development finance,” PE has disguised predatory financial extraction as foreign aid in the Global South.

The list of PE depredations goes on and on, from exacerbating the housing crisis to provoking health care bankruptcies to jeopardizing the airplane repair business and fire truck manufacturing (some critics claim that PE consolidation of the emergency vehicle market played a part in worsening the 2025 Los Angeles fires). It’s fair to say that PE’s touch is a disgusting inversion of King Midas’s. While everything he touched turned to gold, for consumers, everything PE touches turns to shit.