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

The Screw Billionaire

He built a €40B empire from a box of screws and a Bible.

He prayed in the morning and sold in the afternoon.

Reinhold Würth’s Playbook for Building an Empire

Thread Germany, 1945.

The war is over, but the ruins still smoke.

A 10-year-old boy named Reinhold counts screws beside his parents in a cold mill.

From those endless hours of repetition, he learned the two laws that would guide his life:

Discipline creates freedom, and detail creates empire.

Boring Cash: The Candle Investor

Wall Street was buying internet stocks.

Ted Forstmann bought Yankee Candles and made $830M

The Playbook of the Private Equity Legend

Thread TARGET

A quirky candle maker from Massachusetts making over 80 million candles a year yet starved of capital.

Revenues had crossed $100M, but it lacked structure, governance, and strategy.

Perfect Forstmann prey: profitable, premium, undercapitalized

The Contrarian Private Equity Genius

David Bonderman made billions by doing what others feared

Turned $66M into $700M

Lost $1.3B in one of history’s worst deals.

And still built a $100B empire.

This is the David Bonderman playbook The Rebel Lawyer

Born in LA, 1942. Son of Russian immigrants.

Harvard Law & clerked for a Supreme Court Justice.

He could’ve had the easy life…partner track, DC cocktail parties.

But he wanted to learn how to fix broken companies.

The Billionaire Bulldog

Buy. Strip. Flip.

Ron Perelman made billions buying unloved assets and flipping before the market woke up.

His Investment Playbook⬇️ First Taste of Leverage

No baseball. No television. Only balance sheets and discipline.​

By 11, Ron was attending board meetings.​

By 16, he was analyzing cost ledgers.​

At 21, he helped his father buy Esslinger Brewery for ~$800K and sell it for $1M profit

The Godfather of Venture Capital

He turned $50K into $100M.

Drank Chardonnay in meetings and fired slow thinkers

Fred Adler wrote the original venture capital playbook.

Thread⬇️ $150K Bet That Made $15 Million

In 1968, Adler invested $150K in a small computer firm:

Data General.

It was his first big hit and turned into $15–20 million

He’d found his formula:

“Marry money with innovation.”

The Marine Banker Who Conquered Wall Street

He fought in Vietnam.

Then used battlefield tactics to buy 100+ banks

The playbook of Hugh McColl Origins of a Warrior Banker

McColl grew up on discipline, faith, and ambition.

He joined the Marines, and learned his first principle:

„You win by moving forward. Always.”

When he joined North Carolina National Bank (NCNB) in 1959, he treated every market like a battlefield.

Europe’s Next Danaher

Backed by Spotify’s Daniel Ek and Danaher’s Mitch Rales.

Jan Mohr acquired 60 software firms and 10×’d his stock in five years.

Goal: NASDAQ-listed European Tech Champion

The Chapters Group story⬇️ What They Buy

Chapters buys boring but essential niche software:

• Police & fire dispatch systems
• Gun-license & civic-registry platforms
• Fintech rails for payments & compliance
• Cybersecurity infrastructure for municipalities

Retention ≈ 97 %.

Master of the LBO: Private Jet King

Ted Forstmann turned a dying Gulfstream into billions.

His funds earned 55% annual returns for 19 years.

The Playbook of the Private Equity Titan⬇️ The Legend

"I like deals like I like women: big, complicated, and with a lot of surprises"

Ted Forstmann dated Princess Diana, fought Michael Milken and made Billions.

WOW!!!

@OrlandoBravoTB just dropped a masterclass on Software Private Equity

AI. Valuations. Exits.

Notes from his latest interview ⬇️ Valuations & the Dot-Com Era

AI valuations today are a bubble:

A $50M ARR company cannot be worth $10B.

To double investors’ money, it must produce $1B in free cash flow.

Even if the product is right, even if the market's right, that's a tall order.

Difference vs Dot-Com:.

Now you have some really big companies with big healthy balance sheets financing this activity, which was different than what happened roughly 25 years ago.

The Private Equity Billionaire

Henry Silverman made Billions without owning a single asset.

He turned dying brands into royalty machines

The Silverman Playbook ⬇️ The Mind of a Deal Genius

Silverman was a builder who could sell faster than he built.

Everything he owned was for sale if the price exceeded intrinsic value.

Business was a balance sheet:

Assets exist to be marked to market, not worshipped.

That detachment made him lethal.

Every empire starts with a small deal.

A.N. Pritzker bought a failing coffee-pot maker for $25K

Sold it for $23 MILLION!

That tiny deal became the seed of a $30 Billion dynasty.

If you buy below book value and wait long enough, America does the rest

The Pritzker Formula⬇️ Abram Nicholas Pritzker was a Depression-era lawyer with a taste for hard assets and harder bargains.

In 1942, while most investors hoarded cash and fear,
A.N bought a bankrupt coffee pot company for $25,000.

The Private Equity Pioneer

A broke Hebrew teacher learned to buy companies with their own money

He acquired billion-dollar empires without putting up cash

Every buyout king used his playbook

Thread🧵 Riklis arrived in America after WWII with nothing.

One professor gave him an
assignment:

Find a stock where cash per share exceeded the share price.

He realized if you could take control of such a company, you could redeploy its cash for acquisitions.

The Most Underestimated Dealmaker

Jared Kushner just pulled off Wall Street’s biggest buyout.

From Fifth Avenue to the Abraham Accords to $55B Buyout

The Dealmaking Playbook of Jared Kushner

Thread At just 26 years old, Jared Kushner bought 666 Fifth Avenue for $1.8 billion.

Thesis: Fifth Avenue retail was undervalued.

Legacy leases could be reset, potentially raising retail rents from $15m to $50–60m annually.

Months later, the financial crisis hit.

THE TEXAS GUNSLINGER

Billionaire Harold Simmons started with $5,000

He raided boardrooms, unlocked hidden billions, and rewrote the rules of LBOs.

He mastered the art of turning boring companies into Billions.

The Playbook of the LBO Pioneer

Thread Simmons wasn’t born into money.

In 1961, he scraped together $5,000 to buy a small drugstore in Dallas.

Then he borrowed $650,000 to buy a chain of seven more.

By 1973, he had built 100 stores.

He sold them for stock worth $50M.

That was his first kill.

BREAKING: Apollo just launched a new vehicle in sports finance.

When billionaires need cash for teams, they call Apollo.

Sports are the next trillion-dollar asset class.

Thread Apollo just announced the launch of Apollo Sports Capital (ASC

This is a permanent capital platform dedicated to financing teams, leagues, venues, and live events.

Amazing Blackstone Guide

Investing in the Picks and Shovels of AI

Thread

At 16, Jay Gould just wanted to escape his father’s failing farm with $5 in his pocket.

Instead, he became America’s first true Wall Street billionaire

Lessons from the Dark Genius of Wall Street Arbitrage the Law

Gould studied the NY Railroad Act of 1850 until he spotted a loophole: bonds could be swapped into stock and back again.

He used this to seize control of railroads with little cash.

The biggest buyout in history is about to drop.

Silver Lake + Saudi Arabia want to take EA private for $48B.

The Playbook behind the Deal ⬇️ Why now?

The gaming industry is at a paradoxical moment:

1. Revenues are high ($178B global market).
2. Growth is slowing.
3. Costs are rising.
4. Talent is consolidating into fewer, larger studios.

EA is simultaneously essential and vulnerable.

Private Equity & Generative AI

Vista Equity believes Gen AI is the next trillion-dollar wave in enterprise software.

Core belief: Gen AI won’t replace enterprise software. It will make it indispensable.

Here’s their Private Equity Thesis for Gen AI A private equity giant confronts the AI moment

For two decades, Vista Equity has made software its sole religion.

Now the firm is facing the question every investor asks: Is Generative AI another bubble or the next internet?

Vista’s thesis: firms that integrate Gen AI into products and processes will capture market share and expand margins.

Gen AI is not a marginal productivity tool.

It is the closest technological shock to the internet itself