‘A lot of people were being affected by this rampant rise in costs and wanted to know what was behind it. As it happens, private equity has changed a lot of industry landscapes.’ Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images View image in fullscreen ‘A lot of people were being affected by this rampant rise in costs and wanted to know what was behind it. As it happens, private equity has changed a lot of industry landscapes.’ Photograph: Bloomberg/Getty Images Consumed Private equity ‘People are feeling the real impacts’: influencers are targeting private equity with satire and rage Skits and parodies making fun of the trillion-dollar industry have taken over social media, racking up millions of views
Prefer the Guardian on Google J ohnny Hilbrant Partridge kept getting stuck next to the same kind of finance guy at weddings – the one bragging about his family’s full-time nanny and lavish vacations while name-dropping elite club memberships and private schools.
To Partridge, a former fitness instructor, their shameless knack for self-promotion felt ripe for comedy. Using a filter that puts an exaggerated sneer on his face, Partridge donned a puffer vest and created “The PE Guy”, a caricature of the men who work in the private equity industry.
“All we did is acquire some youth hockey complexes, implement dynamic pricing and put some people on recurring revenue subscription models,” Partridge scoffed in a video after lawmakers introduced a bill this year to ban private equity from youth sports. “This country used to reward innovation, and suddenly it’s wrong to charge $11,000 for a development lacrosse weekend … give me a break.”
Read more Since he first debuted the character last year, “The PE Guy” has racked up millions of views on Instagram and TikTok , becoming the most popular player in a fast-growing ecosystem skewering private equity. The multitrillion-dollar industry has turned into a catch-all online for the ills of modern capitalism, inspiring “a day in the life” skits and parody rap music videos .
For many viewers, the draw is the dark humor, something that even the finance guys are embracing. Partridge said he gets invited to speak at insurance and private equity conferences and finance companies’ annual meetings as comic relief.
But it’s also been a way many Americans are learning how the industry, which often operates out of view and without the same oversight or regulation as publicly traded corporations, is affecting their lives.
Every business has bad actors, Partridge said, but he chose to focus on private equity because it is changing everyday things like healthcare so radically that “people are feeling the real impacts from it”, he said.
Private equity has found its way into everything from funeral homes to family dental offices. Once they were acquired by private equity firms, beloved chains such as JoAnn Fabrics and Toys “R” Us faced bankruptcies , and many name brands taken over by the industry have degraded in quality.
“When people say private equity, they don’t just mean the exact technical term,” said Hojung Kim, whose August Instagram post on how private equity is changing veterinary care got a million views in just two days. The term has come to represent “leveraged buyouts, hard cost-cutting in order to ruthlessly profit-maximize and saddling the business with debt in order to self-enrich”.
Struck by the response, Kim, co-founder of an affordable LSAT prep business , started a series on other industries changed b…