Rewind: How private equity kills companies and communities

January 15, 2026·52 min·5 clips

Megan Greenwell links private equity's rise to 1980s corporate raiders and the milieu that produced Donald Trump.

Private equity keeps recurring. Nilay Patel opens this rewind by treating PE as something bigger than a finance beat. The guest is Megan Greenwell, journalist and author of Bad Company: Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream. Nilay's setup is plain: search the phrase and the same ownership pattern starts appearing in very different corners of American life. College sports comes up. So do mobile home parks, healthcare, media, and real estate. That range gives the conversation a civic feel before the interview really starts. The concern is practical, not theoretical. People can feel the results of financial ownership structures even when they never see the structure itself. This is a rewind highlight from a favorite interview from last year. Nilay says it felt timely last summer and still feels timely after the winter break and CES. The strongest part of the excerpt is the setup. It gives listeners the working thesis, then hands the conversation to Greenwell's reporting and book. The ads are heavy in the excerpt. They sell business software, compliance automation, and life insurance, but they do not pull the episode away from its subject. The ending is standard Decoder housekeeping: Nilay thanks Megan, points to the inbox and social accounts, and credits The Verge and Vox Media. The tone is steady and skeptical. The excerpt does not try to prove every case. It asks why the same model keeps showing up in places as different as sports, housing, healthcare, and media. That makes the promise diagnostic: this is a story about incentives, not one-off bad actors.

As heard by us

A sharp Decoder conversation about private equity as a force shaping industries and ordinary life.

Private equity gets framed here as one of Decoder's big systems problems: a force running through healthcare, media, real estate, and the everyday lives caught downstream.

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