Leveraged Buyout Quotes

Private equity firms aren't necessarily evil by definition. There are many stories of successful turnarounds fueled by private equity, often involving multiple floundering businesses that are rolled into a single entity, eliminating duplicative overhead.

When I was in the leverage buy-out business we bought Weetabix and we leveraged it up to make our return. You could say that anyone who was eating Weetabix was paying for our purchase of Weetabix. It was just business. It is the same for Liverpool.

In the LBO field there is a buried "covariance" with marketable equities, toward disaster in generally bad business conditions, and competition is now extremely intense.

In taking Dell private, we plan to go back to our roots, focusing on the entrepreneurial spirit that made Dell one of the fastest-growing and most successful companies in history.

Less than a year after loading the company up with debt, Romney and Bain gave themselves bonuses four times bigger than the $8 million they had put into the deal.

Manchester United and Liverpool have been bought with huge leverage, and we've got Roman Abramovich at Chelsea who can turn his loans into shares. It is really important for the Premier League to ask itself: if a club is being bought on such a mountain of debt, isn't that a possible recipe for disaster for the future?

Is there any fairness in a system where a group of people can borrow a bunch of money to buy a company and pay themselves millions of dollars in dividends and fees, while the company itself ends up bankrupt and its employees lose their jobs, health insurance and pensions?

Any successful company in the valley gets acquisition offers and has to decide whether or not to take them.

I don't think that Mitt Romney can legitimately say that he learned anything about how to create jobs in the LBO (leveraged buyout) business. The LBO business is about how to strip cash out of old, long-in-the-tooth companies and how to make short-term profits. All the jobs that he talks about came from Staples. That was a very early venture stage deal. That, you know they got out of long before it got to its current size.

Taking the company private was not the easiest thing I've done in my life.

In the Sixties, conglomerates were all the rage.

Mergers and acquisitions, we are always looking for that.

When you are buying companies, everyone in the company feels very good. Their chests are puffed out. At Blackstone, I used to tell people that there is nothing more fun than buying a company with somebody else's money. The business is growing, which creates more opportunity for your employees.

Yahoo would benefit from going private or becoming part of a larger corporation.

The apparent strategy of Pfizer is to take over AstraZeneca, dismember it, and put the different parts of it into its three new divisions, with the ultimate aim of selling off one or more.

In the 1980s, corporate raiders began mounting unfriendly takeovers of companies that could deliver higher returns to their shareholders - if they abandoned their other stakeholders.

There are certainly valid reasons for taking a company private, and it's also possible that C.E.O.s perform better when monitored by a small number of owners in a private company rather than by the dispersed and often uninterested shareholders of a public corporation.

[Corporate] takeovers are for the public good, but that's not why I do it. I do it to make money.

Carl Icahn, corporate raider by trade, is creative, a scrambler, and certainly not to be underestimated.

I definitely don't welcome takeover interests.

We understand that the real market value of Blockbuster may never be fully realized as a wholly owned part of Viacom.

If I'm on the board of any company where there's an offer that comes in, I want to negotiate.

I am very underleveraged. I have a great company. I have a tremendous income. And the reason I say that is not in a braggadocios way. It's because it's about time that this country had somebody running it that has an idea about money.

I never look at an acquisition really by size.