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

Wall Street banker bought a dying popcorn brand for $250K.

Sold it to Hershey for $750M.

The 3000x return playbook: 🧵 Charles Coristine loved Wall Street.

But after nearly 20 years, burnout hit.

He tried everything:
•Vegetarianism
•Meditation
•An MBA

Nothing helped. So he walked away.

$1.2 Trillion Opportunity in Private Equity:

Not biotech. Not crypto.

It’s ELECTRICITY INFRASTRUCTURE⚡️

Thread🧵 America is running out of electricity.

America’s electric grid is facing a massive supply-demand mismatch.

1. Grid must grow +60% by 2030

2. Electricity consumption is projected to increase by 15% by 2050.

3. AI, electric vehicles, chip manufacturing and aging buildings are driving energy demand far beyond what our grid can handle.

4. At the same time, 80% of buildings that will exist in 2050 are already standing and most are terribly inefficient.

Venture Capital is dead.

Long live Private Equity.

Lightspeed. Thrive. a16z. Sequoia.

They’re buying and rolling up companies like Private Equity giants.

Silicon Valley is turning into Private Equity Valley🧵👇 Game Changer: Lightspeed becomes an RIA

Lightspeed Venture Partner has officially registered as a Registered Investment Advisor (RIA).

This is not just a legal formality.

It is a tectonic shift.

It means Lightspeed can now invest without limits in:

✔️ Public stocks
✔️ Secondary shares
✔️ Private equity-style buyouts
✔️ Roll-ups

They can now act like Blackstone in a hoodie.

Bought for $360M.

Sold for $6.1B.

Welcome to the new age of sports private equity.

Here's why Investors are flooding into sports👇 In 2002, Wyc Grousbeck bought the Boston Celtics for $360 million.

In 2025, he sold the team for $6.1 billion, the highest NBA sale ever.

That's a 17x return!

But why are valuations exploding?

Barbarians at the Sluice Gate

KKR is trying to turn sewage into gold.

They’re betting $4B on rescuing UK's most broken utility.

The boldest move of the year 🧵 The Target: Thames Water

- 16M customers
- £20B debt stack
- Raw sewage dumping into the Thames
- Shareholders walked away
- Political pressure at boiling point

Most investors would run.

KKR doubled down.

One man vs $50B oil giant

In one hour, he changed everything.

No shouting.
No threats.

Just a cold plan and $2.5B to back it up.

Wall Street’s most ruthless activist: John Pike doesn’t bluff.

The Elliott Management partner just launched one of the most aggressive proxy fights the energy sector has seen in years

This is how Pike is reshaping the future of oil giants like Phillips 66 and BP:

Thoma Bravo just pulled off the ultimate $10B deal:

The flight software empire inside Boeing

Thread👇 What was acquired?

Jeppesen (aviation data pioneer since 1934)

AerData (aircraft records, lease mgmt)

OzRunways (pilot app for Australia)

Together = the digital core of commercial flight ops.

The King of Bankruptcy.

Wilbur Ross made billions buying bankrupt companies.

Here’s his distressed investing playbook🧵👇 Ross Wilbur hunted collapse.

His edge: mastering Chapter 11 and turning chaos into cashflow.

He wasn’t buying companies — he was buying control, leverage, and optionalities others ignored.

Imagine if forests became more valuable than real estate.

And carbon credits outperformed SaaS.

Here’s how a new wave of PE funds is quietly scaling nature.

Thread 🧵 Nature is no longer just a cause.

It’s becoming a core business strategy — and one of the most underpriced asset class on Earth.

Over 50% of global GDP depends on nature.

But 97% of nature-based projects still lack private capital (EIB, 2023).

That’s not a gap.

That’s a generational opportunity.

Private Equity’s Worst Nightmare.

Oxford professor Ludovic Phalippou ran the PE numbers.

What he found shocked Parliament.

He’s the reason Norway’s $1.5T fund rejected private equity.

Here’s what he found and why it still matters 🧵 In 1998, Ludovic Phalippou landed in LA with a scholarship and a suitcase.

At USC, he crushed his economics PhD — and was stunned by how open the U.S. system was.

In France, he says, your background limits your future.

In America? "No one cares. You just go."