First DJ in the Olympics, Producer, DC based Just married my beautiful wife! ❤️
NYC
Joined January 2010
- Tweets10.2K
- Following619
- Followers1.3K
- Likes80.6K
Medium Steve retweeted
Bowling alleys and arcades used to be affordable, local spots where a working family could spend $20 on a Friday night.
Then private equity and hospitality groups started buying them up to turn them into "gourmet entertainment lounges."
Now it’s $45 an hour to rent a lane, $8 for shoe rentals, $14 for a craft beer, and an arcade card loaded with microtransactions that drains $30 in ten minutes.
We systematically destroyed every cheap, unpretentious third space in America and replaced them with corporate revenue engines designed to extract $150 from you just for leaving your house.
Medium Steve retweeted
it’s crazy that the Right had two years to do literally whatever they wanted and they spent it enriching themselves, bombing iran, and protecting pedophiles
And if chinese models can emulate those, with almost none of the startup costs (so no return needed), they’ll just take over. Doesn’t seem like there’s any way for VC’s to actually get their money back
Medium Steve retweeted
This Haley Stevens 11th hour betrayal should be a wake up call for 2028 that anyone who takes AIPAC money is completely compromised
Medium Steve retweeted
yeah this is insane lmao
The Milwaukee Brewers' championship was 57 years in the making -- and it came together in spectacular fashion. Free at ESPN, the inside story of how it happened, from a late July declaration to a bus that everyone boarded to a whole lot of rally heaters. espn.com/mlb/story/_/id/5029…
Medium Steve retweeted
My friend's boomer dad spent nearly 25 years building a business from the ground up. Started with nothing. Grew it into something worth close to $3 million.
Sold it in 2021 to a private equity firm that came in talking about "scaling" and "taking it to the next level."
Within a year, they'd cut 30 jobs, raised prices across the board by close to 40%, and quietly dissolved the retirement plan he'd spent two decades building for his employees. Stripped it for parts, extracted what they could, and moved on to the next acquisition.
He told my friend it's the single worst decision of his career. Said he genuinely believed they'd protect what he spent his whole life building.
Private equity firms don't buy businesses to run them long-term. They buy them to extract value fast and exit. And this exact playbook is running right now in industries you interact with every single week, healthcare, retail, even your kid's daycare.
I like how seafood boil restaurants looked at damning microplastic studies and just said “Fuck it, we ride”
Medium Steve retweeted
The forever K is here...
1. Food banks have record demand. Michelin tables have never been harder to book.
2. Robotaxis and AI made chauffeurs and assistants almost free. So status moved to what software can't make: a $180M Van Gogh hits Sotheby's next month.
3. Ten stocks are 40% of the S&P 500. The other 490 are along for the ride.
4. Homes under $1M are a buyer's market. Over $5M, it's a seller's market.
5. Delta now makes more from the front of the plane than the back.
6. Spirit is dead. Private jet flights just hit an all-time high.
7. Hotels are either Motel 6 or the Four Seasons. Marriott is the new Motel 6.
8. Subprime auto delinquencies are at a record. Porsche wants to be Ferrari.
9. Applebee's is running ads saying it's cheaper than McDonald's.
10. Chipotle gave up on everyone under $100K and kept the $20 burrito crowd.
Medium Steve retweeted
I HATE PRIVATE EQUITY.
I HATE IT WITH SO MUCH PASSION.
Not investing. Not markets. Not business in general.
I hate this one specific move: a firm buys a company using borrowed money, loads that debt onto the company's own books instead of the firm's, pays itself management fees straight out of whatever profit is left, and walks away clean no matter what happens to the business.
Sears was a dominant, functioning retailer when Eddie Lampert's hedge fund took it over. Over the next 13 years, it got loaded with billions in debt, its real estate and brands got sold off piece by piece to pay Lampert and his fund, and the company filed for bankruptcy in 2018 with over $11 billion in liabilities.
More than 200,000 jobs disappeared over that stretch.
Lampert personally walked away with an estimated $1.4 billion.
He didn't lose. He was never going to lose. The debt was never his.
Nobody's saying capitalism itself is the problem.
I'm saying there's a version of it where you can gut a company for parts, call it "restructuring," collect the fees either way, and the law treats it as a legitimate business strategy every single time.
Would not be surprised if this is a weird psy-op. A vague protest movement of mostly retirees building out a giant listserv, presumably to sell things or give to the government in the future. Struck me as weird from the jump even if i agree with them overall.
