00:00Have you ever heard of Silver Lake? It's a private equity firm making big moves and scooping up some major companies.
00:09Silver Lake began in 1999, around the same time many private equity firms began coming around.
00:15Now those firms basically take a pool of money from wealthy people to purchase stakes in privately held companies or purchase publicly traded companies.
00:24You can think of this as a literally a private investment and the equity of the business.
00:28All right. So let's say if you're an investor and I'm running a company and you want to invest in my company, I get the financing and you get the returns.
00:37So this is basically a good deal for the both of us.
00:40Silver Lake currently has more than one hundred and ten billion dollars of combined assets.
00:45Their most recent was being a part of the purchase of video game company Electronic Arts.
00:50Now, that's just one of the dozens of companies they've bought or invested in, including Waymo, Airbnb, Dell Technologies and more.
00:59They also have heavily invested in several sports companies.
01:02Now, firms like Silver Lake are a new way for companies to get money as opposed to traditional means like a bank.
01:08The end goal of all of these private equity funds is, in my opinion, a lot of it is to make high returns.
01:15Right. And why do they need these high returns?
01:17Because they need to justify their investors.
01:20And investors in these private equity funds are all sorts of big institutional investors.
01:27Take Electronic Arts as an example.
01:30Each shareholder got $210 per share that they held, making the top shareholders extremely wealthy.
01:36Then maybe from the cash I get, I can start another company and then do this process again.
01:41That's how I become a serial entrepreneur.
01:43Right. Which is which I see happening a lot.
01:45So what if you're not a top shareholder or executive in your company and are an employee whose company is being bought by private equity?
02:01As an employee, I would be very worried.
02:05And it's not only about my job, right?
02:07It's also about the management changing.
02:08So let's say I have my job, but the management changes.
02:11And now suddenly I have a new boss.
02:13I am under a different payroll system, for example.
02:16And then I have different expectations.
02:18And then again, there's like, you know, this this this pressure of am I doing the right thing in my job?
02:25And am I now suddenly the goalpost changes?
02:28Silver Lake did not respond to Straight Arrow News's request for comment.
02:32For Straight Arrow News, I'm Lauren Keenan.
02:34If you want more on this story, download the Straight Arrow News app or visit san.com.
Be the first to comment