Updated July 19, 2026 · 360 companies · 78 PE firms tracked
74 private-equity-backed companies went bankrupt in 2024 alone.
These are the ones you shopped at, ate at, and worked for.
We track what really happens after PE buys a company, and grade every deal on customers, workers, operational integrity, and long-term health. Most fail. A few succeed. The honest answer is usually complicated.
How this site works
When private equity buys a company, what actually changes? That is the only question this site asks. The people who were there submit what they saw: employees, customers, founders who sold. Every account is email-verified before it publishes, tagged by role and time period, and kept separate from our editorial record. Vague rants don't pass the form. Specificity is the price of entry.
Alongside the firsthand record, we maintain a sourced database of acquisitions, bankruptcies, price increases, staffing cuts, and closures, each linked to public evidence: SEC filings, court records, inspection data, peer-reviewed research, local journalism.1 Reports are graded by evidence strength, not volume. A single story is noise; a pattern across dozens of verified accounts, corroborated by documents, is signal.
We are not anti-investment, and this is not a complaint board. Deals that made companies healthier are documented with the same rigor as the failures. The Greenhouse exists because counterexamples make the failure cases mean something. What we are against is not knowing.
The outcome map
Deals are classified by evidence, not ideology.
Every deal we document is assessed across six dimensions: customer outcome, worker outcome, founder experience, community impact, operational integrity, and post-exit health. Financial returns to investors are not one of them. Full methodology →
Serious harm, decline, bankruptcy, or closure linked to PE ownership.
38 documented →Outcomes contested, early, or different depending on who you ask. The hardest category.
3 documented →Companies that got healthier under PE ownership. A high bar, by design.
1 verified →Not enough credible information to classify. A fair record needs an uncertainty bucket.
Add a source →* Greenhouse criteria: strong or mixed on all four core pillars (customers, workers, operations, post-exit health) with at least three strong. Investor returns alone never qualify. One weak score disqualifies.
What the research shows
PE-owned nursing homes showed a 10% increase in short-term mortality among Medicare patients, alongside lower nurse staffing and reduced compliance with care standards.
Workplace injury rates fell sharply and persistently after PE buyouts of publicly traded firms. The evidence cuts both ways, and we publish it both ways.
The wire
Private equity, this week.
Deals, bankruptcies, and regulatory action, aggregated hourly from the press.
Full wire →If you were there,
you know what changed.
What the company was like before the deal. What was promised during it. What happened after, to staffing, prices, quality, and morale. That record exists only in the people who lived it. It is verified by email, published under structure, and never attributed beyond your role.
Share your experienceSource, correction, or company response? Submit it
The index