There’s a lot of money to be made destroying companies. Sophisticated financial instruments like swaps, leveraged buyouts, and death spiral financing can be used to vampirically destroy publicly traded companies. You buy a controlling share using debt, install a bunch of overpaid C-suite execs who sell all their shares and hire overpaid consultants to tell them useless shit, meanwhile the fundamentals of the business erode, corporate media goes negative on command while your hedge fund buddies short the shit out of it. Sooner or later the whole thing goes bankrupt and private equity buzzards swoop in to snap up whatever value remains.

I haven’t had coffee yet so this is not an essay, only a mild rant. I’m not gonna die on any of these hills right now, it’s my day off.