KKR tore apart a $6B conglomerate and made $2B

One of the largest LBOs ever. Beatrice was once a powerhouse.

A massive food conglomerate built over decades.

But by the 1980s, it had become bloated, unfocused, and poorly managed.

Stock was lagging and costs were out of control.

Imagine being 23 with millions in debt and a failing cable business your dad left behind.

But Craig McCaw doubled down.

He bought spectrum licenses for pennies and sold them for $11.5B. Craig McCaw’s story is one of the most underappreciated playbooks in modern dealmaking.

He used debt and overlooked spectrum licenses to build a $12 billion empire.

One of the Greatest Buyouts Ever

He put up $2.3M to buy a business worth more than $1B.

One year later, he had made $100M.

Gordon Cain bought unwanted chemical assets at the bottom of the cycle. Operator Mindset

Gordon Cain spent decades working in the chemical business.

Over the course of nearly half a century he developed a deep understanding of how the industry operated.

By the time he made this deal, he was 75 years old and coming out of retirement.

How is this possible???

$2M in equity → ~$780M exit.

Here is the full deep dive

https://twitter.com/theicahnist/status/2042712234921492564

Technicolor was best known for processing film for Hollywood studios.

The company had expanded into multiple businesses, including:

• Commercial film development
• Consumer services
• A chain of One-Hour Photo stores

Revenue: $229M
Profit: $3.4M

Sports might be the most underfinanced $2.5 trillion asset class in the world.

Apollo published a white paper on sports investing.

Thread For most of the 20th century, sports was a simple business.

Teams made money from ticket sales, concessions, and local sponsorships.

Today the global sports industry is a $2.5 trillion ecosystem.

NBA team valuations have grown more than 10x over the past 20 years.

BREAKING: Thoma Bravo just released their LP meeting slides.

The world's largest software PE firm thinks the market has it completely wrong on software right now.

Public markets are panic-selling software based on AI fear.

Here's what they're seeing: Software is trading at a discount to the S&P 500 for only the second time since the 2008 financial crisis.

Every other time in the last 30 years, software commanded a premium.

The €1 Billionaire

Imagine leaving McKinsey to buy broken companies nobody wanted.

This self-made billionaire acquired nearly 300 businesses across 70 countries.

Sellers paid him to take the deal! His empire starts in a beer garden in Munich.

Löw and his partner are three beers in-

Both barely a year into their jobs. Both already done with it.

One question: can you build an American rags-to-riches story in Germany?

They walk out with a plan.

The Blueprint for Defence Deals

KKR turned Airbus’ spare part into Germany’s radar champion.

Thread

https://twitter.com/theicahnist/status/2020610043985416435

1. Buying Airbus’ “Orphan”

In 2016 KKR bought Airbus’ Defence Electronics unit for about €1.1bn and rebranded it as Hensoldt, after a 19th‑century German optics pioneer.

The business made sensors, radar, electronic warfare systems and avionics.

Private Equity Playbook: European Defence Electronics

The highest-leverage defence bet in Europe is the tech layer underneath it.

Defence electronics is becoming the new industrial infrastructure.

Thread Why electronics have all the leverage

Modern platforms are less about steel, more about silicon and software.

Eurofighter, Leopard 2 and their successors are essentially sensor, comms and computing platforms wrapped in armour.

With every generation, a larger share of equipment budgets shifts into electronics, creating recurring retrofit and upgrade revenue instead of one‑time hardware sales.

The Billionaire Lobster King

John Risley started with a rusty lobster truck.

He ended up cashing out of billion-dollar empires across seafood, nutrition, and telecom.

Thread John Risley grew up watching his father struggle to pay bills

At 10 years old, he told his class he wanted to be a millionaire.

The class and teacher smirked

Golden Age of Football M&A

Two Hollywood guys with zero football experience turned £2M into £350M in 4 years

The Playbook Ryan Reynolds and Rob McElhenney bought Wrexham AFC for £2M in February 2021.

When they took over, the club was basically irrelevant.

Fifth-tier English football!!!!

You have to understand how far DOWN the pyramid that is....

The level where geezers show up in vans and half the players have day jobs selling insurance

Golden Era of Finance: Lord Moneybags

This ruthless Investor built a £12 BILLION empire

He started as a playboy who seduced Audrey Hepburn

Epic playbook of a legend

Thread The Playboy Years

In his younger days, Hanson was the ultimate socialite.

He was tall, charming, and engaged to Audrey Hepburn in the 1950s.

The wedding never happened, but his reputation as the Lord of Glamour remained

How Dr. Karp Thinks

The philosopher who built a $400B+ tech giant.

A thread on the philosophy and mental models The Philosopher Who Studied How We Lie

Karp spent five years writing a PhD dissertation about one obsessive question:

How does language let us say things that violate the rules while technically following the rules?

His argument boiled down to this:

Jargon is how culture provides psychological relief from contradictions without actually resolving them.

You can satisfy your aggressive instincts while maintaining the fiction that you're a good person.

The language does the work.

How to Think Like Peter Thiel

To understand why Thiel avoids competition and consensus, you have to understand the man who shaped how he thinks about desire.

You start with René Girard

Thread Peter Thiel studied under René Girard at Stanford

Girard’s work shaped how he thinks about desire and rivalry. Thiel later applied that framework to business.

Private Equity Legend: EQT

How do you turn rats into €7.2 BILLION?

You buy 400 boring exterminators and wire them with tech.

This is the playbook behind 28x MOIC Why pest control?

1. Recession-resistant demand
2. High recurring revenue, sticky contracts
3. Extreme fragmentation (thousands of mom-and-pop players)
4. Clear route for margin expansion with basic operational excellence

Regardless of recessions, pests keep coming back.

The Data Center Billionaire Playbook

The new monopoly is simple:

If you control the power, you control the future.

The Playbook Every big winner controls one of four chokepoints:

Compute: CoreWeave, Groq​

Connectivity: Astera Labs​

Power: Fermi America​

Land and hard assets: QTS, Nebius​

Own the bottleneck and you can tax the boom.

$20 Billion: Power of Boring Businesses

He bought 88 tiny companies and built a $20B empire

30 years buying 1–5M EBIT niche businesses.

One of America’s greatest compounders.

The Playbook 👇 Larry Mendelson started as accountant, trained to stare at numbers until the truth appeared.

He loved this combination:

1. High margins
2. Repeat demand
3. Real cash

Aerospace replacement parts ticked all three

KKR Data Center Investment Guide

One of the best papers on AI infrastructure investing

KKR explains where the next 20 years of compounding will come from.

The KKR playbook⬇️ When a NVIDIA, makes up 8% of the S&P 500, it’s reasonable to wonder whether an AI bubble is inflating.

Look at the numbers:

AI-related capex = ~5% of U.S. GDP, growing 10%

Hyperscaler capex: $350B+ in 2025, up 30–35% YoY.

Total AI capex across tech: ~$500B this year.

Private Equity Legend: KKR’s $7 Billion Buyout

A legendary 56x return with a struggling grocery chain.

One of KKR’s biggest wins⬇️ A Giant Under Siege

The mid-80s. Safeway’s grocery empire looks massive, but inside it’s leaking profits.

Profitable West Coast stores subsidized weak, distant markets burdened by high costs and local competition

Herbert Haft, a hard-charging raider, smells blood and moves to snap up the chain, piece it out, and make a quick buck.

Denny’s $620M Take-Private

For 72 years, it was where America’s night owls met.

Now it’s a PE turnaround bet

Thread ↓ For decades, Denny’s WAS America

The place where truckers got coffee at 3am.

Where families had Sunday breakfast.

By 2025, Denny’s had lost its rhythm.

Revenues were flat, margins shrinking, and the stock had fallen 34% year-to-date.

Software Private Equity Billionaires

Four Italian friends burn years on a failed startup.

€40,000 left in the bank.

They used it to buy one dying app for €10K.

Today, they run an $11B buyout empire.

The Playbook Buy and Rebuild

Bending Spoons is a hybrid creature:

25% Private Equity, 75% Technology.

They acquire 100% of digital companies and own them forever

They rebuild everything from the code to the culture, from the cloud architecture to the product vision