You can turn a low-profit “boutique” business that pays the salary of 100 people, into a high-margin marque for an acquiring larger-sized corp where every one of those employees get thrown out on their asses because they’re redundant post-consolidation.

If you built the boutique business to get a payday, maybe you’d consider that a win. The market certainly would.

If you built the boutique business because the megaco had a monopoly and was stagnating and awful and you believed in a vision where you can do better — then the PE firm just forced you to take an L by selling to that same megaco and hollowing out your business to just become another head of its behemoth.

If you built the boutique business to work with your favorite people in a non-hellish work environment and ensure they all get to live comfortably — you’ve probably developed cirrhosis from all the regret you’re drinking away.

Brutal

If PE ruined 5 companies for every success but that one success paid back 10x, someone would do it.

Eh, you'd expect that trend to take something like decades to fully percolate and result in behavioral change, if ever.

You could apply your first sentence pretty directly to MLMs, for instance.