Blackstone is putting BILLIONS into the most disruptive shift of our lifetime

The Energy Transition

The Playbook⬇️ We’re in the middle of a once-in-a-century shake-up:

Data centers + AI are sucking power like never before.

EVs & electrification are stressing old grids.

Governments are throwing money at decarbonization.

It’s chaotic, expensive, and full of opportunity

How to buy great businesses that nobody wants and make a fortune doing it.

Corporate orphans. Neglected divisions.

The Carve-Out Guide⬇️ So… What’s a Carve-Out?

You’re buying a business from someone who doesn’t want it…

and selling it to someone who finally does.

Some giant conglomerate has a perfectly decent business, but they’ve got 87 divisions, 14 layers of management, and they forgot this one even existed.

You come in, offer a fair price (or maybe a little less), and voilà, you just bought a future IPO.

They analyzed 10,000+ PE deals.

54% of Private Equity value creation comes from one thing.

Let’s break it down⬇️ Value Creation

Across all deals globally, value creation comes from:

-Revenue Growth: 54%
-Multiple Expansion: 32%
- Margin Expansion: 14%

In today’s high-rate regime, revenue growth is no longer optional.

It’s the core driver.

The Modern Rainmaker

From a kid in Texas to $30 BILLION AUM.

$20B+ in profits.

He built one of the most successful family offices ever.

The full arc of John Phelan’s story⬇️ Dallas, 1986.

John Phelan graduates Phi Beta Kappa from SMU.

Economics. Political Science. Top of his class.

He has hunger for the game.

He heads to Goldman Sachs, Investment Banking Division.

Mentors; Hank Paulson. Byron Trott.

Private Equity Legend: 3i

The most legendary PE deal in Europe.

40% IRR. 15x MOIC

Thread The Target

Action – a non-food discount retailer offering simple, functional products at ultra-low prices.

•~6,000 SKUs, 2/3 below €2
•Mass-market focus on convenience & affordability

Founded 1993. Low-margin, fragmented space.

Largest LBO Failure in History

In 2007, KKR & TPG bet on the “safest” asset class.

In reality, it was a ticking bomb.

The biggest PE bankruptcy ever.

Thread TXU looked like a dream LBO:

- Largest coal power operator in Texas

- 3M retail customers

- $4B EBITDA

- Stable utility cash flows

KKR & TPG thought they’d locked in a “safe” annuity.

Instead, they set a ticking bomb.

Private Equity Legend: Ted Forstmann

- Buy a dying jet company.

- Make it the Rolex of aviation.

- Sell it for $5.5B.

Now every billionaire wants one. The Opportunity

Gulfstream was once a pioneer in business aviation.

In 1990, it was stagnating:

- Aging aircraft models (GIII near end-of-life)

- Bloated org chart, low productivity

- Undifferentiated in an increasingly crowded market
- R&D cutbacks = innovation freeze

Wall Street investor bought a dying startup for $6M.

Turned it into a $10B biometric monopoly.

The playbook ↓ In 2010, Caryn Seidman-Becker bought CLEAR for $6M… out of bankruptcy.

Angry customers. Airport hardware rotting in storage.

She was a hedge fund manager. Not a tech CEO.

What she built is a monopoly in motion!

Private Equity Legend: €236M Toilet Turnaround

Terra Firma turned ugly rest stops into a 7.5x return

By fixing toilets, launching vouchers, and licensing urinals.

Thread Tank & Rast owned 90%+ of service areas along the German Autobahn.

A real estate monopoly with 500M annual visitors.
But...

🚗 Only 6% of cars actually stopped
🍔 Only 50% of those bought anything
⛽ They made profits only by overcharging fuel.

A sleeping giant.

The Ghost of American Investing

- Buys oil wells, telecoms & venues
- Finds hidden asset rights
- Spins cashflow into more deals
- Stays silent

He owns the Lakers, Coachella, and the fiber under your feet.

Own What People Depend On 🧵 Phil Anschutz is 27, broke, and standing in front of an exploding oil well.

No cash to stop the fire.

So he calls Universal Studios.

He sells them the rights to film Red Adair putting it out—for $100K.

- Pays Adair.
- Buys up leases.
- Turns a crisis into millions.

The Cheapskate Billionaire

German immigrant executed a brutal LBO play:

- Take control.
- Strip it down.
– Extract $4.6B selling what public markets mispriced

Thread From Immigrant to Empire

John W. Kluge arrived in the U.S. from Germany.

He started in food brokerage and spotted an opportunity:

A tiny TV company, Metropolitan Broadcasting, with 2 radio stations.

He bought control in 1959.

Then came the build-up.

The best IRR zone in Europe.

🇨🇭🇩🇪🇦🇹 is what the U.S. mid-market was 20 years ago.

Fragmented. Founder-owned.

Here’s how to catch up 🧵 Valuations ≠ US heat.

DACH doesn’t price like the U.S.
You’ll still find:

• 6–8x EBIT for niche leaders
• 2–3x revenue for profitable SaaS
• Sub-5x EBITDA for cash-cow industrials

Boring on paper. Beautiful in IRR.

The Greatest Private Equity Deal of All Time?

One $8M deal became a $30 BILLION empire.

5275x MOIC

The Power of Boring Industries

Thread Start with a search fund. End with $30 BILLION

They found a niche roadside assistance biz: Road Rescue.

$5.9M revenue
$1.5M EBITDA

Paid: ~4.5x EBITDA

The Best Private Equity Model?

$17M turned into $1B+.

Will Thorndike (author of The Outsiders) is building the future of long-term compounding.

A new kind of HoldCo.

Let’s break it down👇 Who is Will Thorndike?

Author of The Outsiders, praised by Warren Buffett as one of the best business books ever written.

– Was an early architect of the search fund model

– Backed the greatest PE deal of all time (5,000x MOIC)

11.9x MOIC in 24 months

233% IRR

Francisco Partners turned a forgotten medtech unit into $635M.

🧵 The Forgotten Asset

In 2015, Qualcomm bought Capsule Technologies – a med device integration firm.

By 2019, Capsule was buried inside Qualcomm Life, unloved and non-core.

Private Equity Legend: Silver Lake

They paid $0 for Seagate’s core business.

Then made $ BILLIONS and the IRS got NOTHING!

The deal that built a $100B empire 🧵 A Mispriced Giant

Seagate was the world’s largest disk drive maker ($6.5B rev). It also owned 128M shares of VERITAS Software.

But Seagate’s entire market cap was less than its VERITAS stake.

Investors valued its core business at less than $0.

Silver Lake saw the arbitrage.

"Private equity has lost its way."

Orlando Bravo just called out the entire industry

Thread 🧵 PE’s identity crisis

Bravo says PE forgot its core principle:

This is not a "buy & hold forever" business.

That’s what the public markets are for.

Firms became obsessed with interest rates, inflation, and Fed signals. Instead of buying, improving, and selling companies.

Asset management is dead.

Origination is the real alpha.

Apollo cracked the Code.

The $800B playbook🧵 Whoever controls origination controls the future of finance:

→ Originate your own paper
→ Underwrite it in-house
→ Compound it for decades

A full-stack, $800B credit empire.

Golden Age of Private Equity Is Over?

> 12,000 companies are stuck in funds.
> Default rates are spiking.
> Secondary markets are flooding.

Thread In the 2010s, private equity was untouchable.
Every allocator wanted more.

30%+ IRRs, “alpha,” and a sense of exclusivity.

But behind that mystique was a model that relied on two things:

1. Cheap debt
2. Constant exits

Now both are broken.

The LBO is dead.

The biggest Private Equity Investors are now self-funding their buyouts.

Welcome to the era of Equity-Led Buyouts.

THREAD The Golden Era of Debt Is Dead.

In the 2010s, cheap money fueled massive LBOs

It was textbook financial engineering:

- Load debt
- Slash costs
- Exit at a higher multiple
- That machine is stalling.

Special Forces operator built a $200M+ empire

From Iraq to Harvard to 100 car repair shops.

The insane story of Logan Leslie

🧵 The Opportunity No One Wanted

While searchers chased HVAC, SaaS, and dental clinics…

Logan Leslie went into a gritty niche: car repair.

Why?
→ Non-discretionary revenue
→ Aging sellers (60%+ over age 60)
→ Huge TAM: 100K fragmented shops across the US
→ Nobody competing for these deals