Audiobook · Business · ~22 hours
This is a book about the moment American capitalism discovered it could swallow itself whole and call it innovation.
"Huge brains, small necks, weak muscles, and fat wallets — these are the dominant Rcharacteristics of the '80s — the generation of swine." -- Hunter S. Thompson, San Francisco Examiner, 1986
The Hunter quote may not be about the folks at the center of this book, but it does describe them perfectly.
This is business journalism that read like a thriller and characters so unbelievable you'd swear they were fictional. Every word is reported. And thirty-five years later, every page still feels like it could have been written yesterday.
Bryan Burrough and John Helyar from The Wall Street Journal had front-row seats to the largest leveraged buyout (LBO) in history: the $25 billion fight for RJR Nabisco in 1988.
The story revolves around Ross Johnson, the charismatic, free-spending CEO who kept a fleet of corporate jets, paid athletes millions as "consultants," and lived as though the company existed to fund his lifestyle. When RJR's stock price stalled at $55 a share in 1988, Johnson decided to take the company private through a management buyout. He'd buy the shareholders out, strip what he didn't want, and keep the rest.
The most interesting facet of the whole debacle that ensures when reading today, decades later, is how clearly it describes a template that the financial world would repeat. With variations, we're seeing this meta-game play out again and again. The Gamestop maniac Ryan Cohen being one of the most recent weird and very stupid examples.
With all this, the math was largely vibes. And even moreso now. For this one, the projections were built on assumptions about growth rates, cost cuts, and asset sales that existed primarily in pitch decks. The deal was so large that the usual checks and balances — the scrutiny of bankers, the skepticism of boards — simply didn't function. When numbers have enough zeros, they become abstract. At a certain scale, the entire enterprise was operating on faith.
This is the pattern that echoes through the decades: the dot-com bubble, the subprime mortgage crisis, the SPAC craze, the crypto winter. New financial instruments get invented. They work spectacularly for a while. They get so large and so complex that nobody — not the people selling them, not the people buying them, and certainly not the people regulating them — fully understands what they've built. And then, eventually, gravity returns.
This is a ~22 hour audiobook listen (because that's the only way I read nowadays) about a corporate takeover in 1988. It is dense with financial mechanics, boardroom politics, and a huge host of professional firms' names and the people within them. It will not be everyone's idea of a great read.
But if you've ever wondered how modern finance actually works — not the textbook version, but the version with egos, panic, and conference calls at midnight — this is the text. If you work in law, banking, private equity, restructuring, or anywhere near the machinery of corporate dealmaking, this book will feel like meeting the ghosts of everyone who built the world you work in. If you're simply drawn to great investigative journalism, it's a masterpiece of the form.
I consider this a close cousin to Indecent Exposure - A True Story of Hollywood and Wall Street, which is equally as good, if not better, but dealing with different industry of the Hollywood machine.
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