Matt Levine, Columnist

Private Equity Is Getting Boring

Also VC competition, the DallasNews deal, AI in finance, stablecoin lending and black swans.

September 23, 2025 at 6:01 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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A simple gloomy model you could have of private equity is:

Like: There was an arbitrage, and correcting it made people rich, and now it is corrected, so correcting it can no longer make you rich. If you want to buy a good company, lever it up, improve its operations and sell it back to the public markets: