
Bad Company
Private Equity and the Death of the American Dream
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Narrated by:
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Dan Bittner
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By:
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Megan Greenwell
About this listen
A timely work of singular reportage and a damning indictment of the private equity industry told through the stories of four American workers whose lives and communities were upended by the ruinous effects of private equity takeovers.
Private equity runs our country, yet few Americans have any idea how ingrained it is in their lives. Private equity controls our hospitals, daycare centers, supermarket chains, voting machine manufacturers, local newspapers, nursing home operators, fertility clinics, and prisons. The industry even manages highways, municipal water systems, fire departments, emergency medical services, and owns a growing swath of commercial and residential real estate.
Private equity executives, meanwhile, are not only among the wealthiest people in American society, but have grown to become modern-day barons with outsized influence on our politics and legislation. CEOs of firms like Blackstone, Carlyle, KKR, and Apollo are rewarded with seats in the Senate and on the boards of the country’s most august institutions; meanwhile, entire communities are hollowed out as a result of their buyouts. Workers lose their jobs. Communities lose their institutions. Only private equity wins.
Acclaimed journalist Megan Greenwell’s Bad Company unearths the hidden story of private equity by examining the lives of four American workers that were devastated as private equity upended their employers and communities: a Toys R Us floor supervisor, a rural doctor, a local newspaper journalist, and an affordable housing organizer. Taken together, their individual experiences also pull back the curtain on a much larger project: how private equity reshaped the American economy to serve its own interests, creating a new class of billionaires while stripping ordinary people of their livelihoods, their health care, their homes, and their sense of security.
In the tradition of deeply human reportage like Matthew Desmond’s Evicted, Megan Greenwell pulls back the curtain on shadowy multibillion dollar private equity firms, telling a larger story about how private equity is reshaping the economy, disrupting communities, and hollowing out the very idea of the American dream itself. Timely and masterfully told, Bad Company is a forceful rebuke of America’s most consequential, yet least understood economic forces.
©2025 Megan Greenwell (P)2025 HarperCollins PublishersListeners also enjoyed...
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Story
The ultrarich hold more of America’s wealth than they did in the heyday of the Carnegies and Rockefellers. Here, Evan Osnos’s incisive reportage yields an unforgettable portrait of the tactics and obsessions driving this new Gilded Age, in which superyachts, luxury bunkers, elite tax dodges, and a torrent of political donations bespeak staggering disparities of wealth and power. With deft storytelling and meticulous reporting, this is a book about the indulgences, incentives, and psychological distortions that define our economic age.
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Just okay
- By Lara on 07-05-25
By: Evan Osnos
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In the Midst of the Years
- A History of Reformation and Revival in America
- By: Thomas Nettles
- Narrated by: Joshua David Ling
- Length: 11 hrs and 48 mins
- Unabridged
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Christians yearn for rapid advances in the progress of conversion in the world, holiness in their lives, and fruitful labor for the cause of God and truth. They want God-sent revival. These twelve chapters explore the periods and persons in American history that saw observable advances in these pervasive Christian hopes. Some manifested greater doctrinal purity than others, some highlighted distinctive personalities more than others, and some generated impressive statistics in the number of persons affected.
By: Thomas Nettles
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The Genius Myth
- A Curious History of a Dangerous Idea
- By: Helen Lewis
- Narrated by: Helen Lewis
- Length: 9 hrs and 6 mins
- Unabridged
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You can tell what a society values by who it labels as a genius. You can also tell who it excludes, who it enables, and what it is prepared to tolerate. In The Genius Myth, Helen Lewis unearths how this one word has shaped (and distorted) our ideas of success and achievement. Ultimately, argues Lewis, the modern idea of genius—a single preternaturally gifted individual, usually white and male, exempt from social niceties and sometimes even the law—has run its course.
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Selective, not great…
- By Amazon Customer on 07-12-25
By: Helen Lewis
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The Myth of Private Equity
- An Inside Look at Wall Street’s Transformative Investments
- By: Jeffrey C. Hooke
- Narrated by: Asa Siegel
- Length: 6 hrs and 20 mins
- Unabridged
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Once an obscure niche of the investment world, private equity has grown into a juggernaut, with consequences for a wide range of industries as well as the financial markets. The Myth of Private Equity is a hard-hitting and meticulous exposé from an insider's viewpoint. Jeffrey C. Hooke examines the negative effects of private equity and the ways in which it has avoided scrutiny. He unravels the exaggerations the industry has spun to its customers and the business media, showing the stark realities that are concealed by the funds' self-mythologizing and penchant for secrecy.
By: Jeffrey C. Hooke
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Hedged Out
- Inequality and Insecurity on Wall Street
- By: Megan Tobias Neely
- Narrated by: Tina Nakhleh Falkenbury
- Length: 11 hrs and 51 mins
- Unabridged
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Who do you think of when you imagine a hedge fund manager? A greedy fraudster, a visionary entrepreneur, a wolf of Wall Street? These tropes capture the public imagination of a successful hedge fund manager. But behind the designer suits, helicopter commutes, and illicit pursuits are the everyday stories of people who work in the hedge fund industry—many of whom don't realize they fall within the 1 percent that drives the divide between the richest and the rest.
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History Lessons
- By: Zoe B. Wallbrook
- Narrated by: Jasmin Walker
- Length: 10 hrs and 27 mins
- Unabridged
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As a newly minted junior professor, Daphne Ouverture spends her days giving lectures on French colonialism, writing her first academic book, and going on atrocious dates. Her small world suits her just fine. Until Sam Taylor dies. The rising star of Harrison University’s anthropology department was never one of Daphne’s favorites, despite his popularity. But that doesn’t prevent Sam’s killer from believing Daphne has something that belonged to Sam—something the killer will stop at nothing to get.
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Great mystery!
- By Sarah C on 07-07-25
By: Zoe B. Wallbrook
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Human Nature
- Nine Ways to Feel About Our Changing Planet
- By: Kate Marvel
- Narrated by: Courtney Patterson
- Length: 8 hrs and 4 mins
- Unabridged
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Human Nature is a deeply felt inquiry into our rapidly changing Earth. In each chapter, Marvel uses a different emotion to explore the science and stories behind climate change. As expected, there is anger, fear, and grief—but also wonder, hope, and love. With her singular voice, Marvel takes us on a soaring journey, one filled with mythology, physics, witchcraft, bad movies, volcanoes, Roman emperors, sequoia groves, and the many small miracles of nature we usually take for granted.
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Must read now
- By cynthia W. on 07-09-25
By: Kate Marvel
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Empire of AI
- Dreams and Nightmares in Sam Altman's OpenAI
- By: Karen Hao
- Narrated by: Karen Hao
- Length: 17 hrs and 50 mins
- Unabridged
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When AI expert and investigative journalist Karen Hao first began covering OpenAI in 2019, she thought they were the good guys. Founded as a nonprofit with safety enshrined as its core mission, the organization was meant, its leader Sam Altman told us, to act as a check against more purely mercantile, and potentially dangerous, forces. What could go wrong?
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Well-researched. Timely. Informative. Karen is brilliant and kind!
- By Kahlil Andrews on 05-25-25
By: Karen Hao
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Stupid TV, Be More Funny
- How the Golden Era of The Simpsons Changed Television—and America—Forever
- By: Alan Siegel
- Narrated by: Eric Jason Martin
- Length: 8 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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This comprehensive account of the meteoric rise of The Simpsons combines incisive pop culture criticism and interviews with the show’s creative team that take listeners inside the making of an American phenomenon during its most influential decade, the 1990s.
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So informative
- By Amazon Customer on 06-15-25
By: Alan Siegel
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Mind Electric
- A Neurologist on the Strangeness and Wonder of Our Brains
- By: Pria Anand
- Narrated by: Pria Anand
- Length: 8 hrs and 59 mins
- Unabridged
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A girl believes she has been struck blind for stealing a kiss. A mother watches helplessly as each of her children is replaced by a changeling. A woman is haunted each month by the same four chords of a single song. In neurology, illness is inextricably linked with narrative, the clues to unraveling these mysteries hidden in both the details of a patient's story and the tells of their body.
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A journey through medical mysteries
- By Farid Dossani on 06-30-25
By: Pria Anand
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Murderland
- Crime and Bloodlust in the Time of Serial Killers
- By: Caroline Fraser
- Narrated by: Patty Nieman
- Length: 16 hrs and 11 mins
- Unabridged
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Caroline Fraser grew up in the shadow of Ted Bundy, the most notorious serial murderer of women in American history, surrounded by his hunting grounds and mountain body dumps, in the brooding landscape of the Pacific Northwest. But in the 1970s and ’80s, Bundy was just one perpetrator amid an uncanny explosion of serial rape and murder across the region. Why so many? Why so weirdly and nightmarishly gruesome? Why the senseless rise and then sudden fall of an epidemic of serial killing?
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Strange hypothesis that serial killers emerge from industrially polluted environments.
- By C. J. on 06-17-25
By: Caroline Fraser
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The Spinach King
- The Rise and Fall of an American Dynasty
- By: John Seabrook
- Narrated by: Dion Graham
- Length: 10 hrs and 14 mins
- Unabridged
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The patriarch, C. F. Seabrook, was hailed as the "Henry Ford of Agriculture." His son Jack, a keen businessman, was poised to take over what Life called "the biggest vegetable factory on earth." But the carefully cultivated facade—glamorous outings by horse-drawn carriage, hidden wine cellars, and movie star girlfriends—hid dark secrets that led to the implosion of the family business. A compelling tale of class and privilege, betrayal and revenge three decades in the making, The Spinach King explores the author's complicated family legacy and the dark corners of the American Dream.
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What a family saga
- By Stacy Renteria on 07-08-25
By: John Seabrook
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Like
- A History of the World's Most Hated (and Misunderstood) Word
- By: Megan C. Reynolds
- Narrated by: Megan C. Reynolds
- Length: 6 hrs and 25 mins
- Unabridged
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A comprehensive and thought-provoking investigation into one of the most polarizing words in the English language. Few words in the English language are as misunderstood as “like.” Indeed, excessive use of this word is a surefire way to make those who pride themselves on propriety, both grammatical and otherwise, feel compelled to issue correctives.
It was well presented with a decent explanation of how PE firms typically function once they’ve become involved in a business.
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I definitely recommend it.
Very informative
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The healthcare story was great
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Lots of filler with interesting points now and then.
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