The Deals
Playbooks
& Deals
The takeovers that rewrote the rules, broken down deal by deal, and the primers that explain the machinery behind them.
The Night They Carved Up RJR Nabisco
A $25 billion wager that would end careers, forge fortunes, and change Wall Street forever, the inside story of the largest leveraged buyout in history.
Read storyWhat Is a Leveraged Buyout?
The nuclear weapon of 1980s finance, explained in plain English. Before you can understand the deals, you need to understand the weapon.
Read primerKKR and the Beatrice Buyout
The $6.2 billion deal that proved the leveraged buyout could scale into the billions, and set the stage, two years later, for RJR.
Read storyRon Perelman Takes Revlon
A beauty company, a leveraged outsider, and a Delaware court ruling that changed the rules of every hostile takeover that followed.
Read storyT. Boone Pickens vs Gulf Oil
The raid that proved no oil major was safe, and that you could lose the company, win the trade, and reshape an entire industry in the process.
Read storyThe Predators' Ball
Every spring, the most feared men in American finance flew to Beverly Hills to trade favors and financing with Michael Milken. It looked like a conference. It was a marketplace.
Read storyPoison Pills, Explained
The corporate defense that made hostile takeovers ten times harder, how the shareholder rights plan works, and why it changed the balance of power in the boardroom.
Read primerThe Rollup Playbook: How Private Equity Builds Empires by Buying Small
A rollup buys dozens of small companies in the same industry, merges them, and sells the combined business at a much higher multiple. The arithmetic is one of the most reliable ways to build serious wealth in modern private equity.
Read primerThe Search Fund Model: How a $400,000 Bet Can Become a $50 Million Exit
A search fund is the most accessible path in finance to running and owning a real company. The model takes about $400,000 of search capital, two years of work, and produces returns that the Stanford GSB has tracked at roughly 35 percent IRR over four decades.
Read primerMultiple Arbitrage Explained: Why Private Equity Pays More Than the Math Suggests
A small company doing $1 million in EBITDA sells for four times earnings. A mid-sized company doing $20 million in EBITDA sells for nine times. The spread is structural, durable, and the single most important reason private equity returns work.
Read primerHow to Spot an LBO Target: A Practical Checklist
Private equity buys roughly 8,000 American companies a year. The ones that produce the best returns share a small list of features any investor can screen for. Here is the checklist that has worked for forty years.
Read primerNet Working Capital in M&A
The single most contested adjustment in any acquisition agreement. Net working capital is where buyers claw back the last 1 to 3 percent of purchase price after closing. Every analyst should understand it before the model is built.
Read primerThe M&A Deal Lifecycle
From the first banker pitch to the post-closing integration. The eight stages of every modern M&A transaction, what each one is actually for, and where the value is won or lost.
Read primerContinuation Funds and GP-Led Secondaries: How PE Firms Hold Their Best Deals Longer
Continuation funds are the fastest-growing exit route in private equity. They let a GP sell a portfolio company from one of its own funds to a new fund it also manages, with fresh outside capital. Here is how the structure works, why LPs accept it, and what every PE analyst should understand about the mechanics.
Read primerRollover Equity in M&A: How Sellers Stay Invested in Their Own Deal
Rollover equity is the portion of a sale price that the founder, management team, or existing investors keep in the new company rather than taking in cash. In private-equity-backed acquisitions, rollover equity is the single most important alignment mechanism between the buyer and the people who will keep running the business. Here is exactly how it works and what an analyst needs to model.
Read primerNAV Financing in Private Equity: How GPs Borrow Against Their Whole Portfolio
NAV financing, also called fund-level financing or NAV lending, is the fastest-growing form of leverage in private equity. A GP pledges the value of an entire portfolio of companies as collateral for a loan to the fund, then uses the proceeds for distributions, follow-on investments, or to support struggling assets. The structure has roughly tripled since 2020 and is now one of the most controversial topics between GPs and LPs.
Read primerNothing in this category yet, more is on the way.