Private Equity Laid Bare cover art

Private Equity Laid Bare

 Preview
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free
Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.
Prime members: New to Audible? Get 2 free audiobooks during trial.
Just £0.99/mo for your first 3 months of Audible.
1 bestseller or new release per month—yours to keep.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, podcasts, and Originals.
Auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly.
Pick 1 audiobook a month from our unmatched collection - including bestsellers and new releases.
Listen all you want to thousands of included audiobooks, Originals, celeb exclusives, and podcasts.
Access exclusive sales and deals.
£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically.

Private Equity Laid Bare

By: Ludovic Phalippou
Narrated by: Warburg Jones
Get this deal Try Premium Plus free

£8.99/mo after 3 months. Cancel monthly. Offer ends 29 January 2026 at 11:59PM GMT.

£8.99/month after 30 days. Renews automatically. See here for eligibility.

Buy Now for £14.99

Buy Now for £14.99

LIMITED TIME OFFER | £0.99/mo for the first 3 months

Premium Plus auto-renews at £8.99/mo after 3 months. Terms apply.

About this listen

Designed for an MBA course on private equity, this textbook (now version 1.7) aims to familiarize any listener with the jargon and mechanics of private equity using simplified examples, real-life situations, and results from thorough academic studies. The intention is to have a book that can be listened more like a novel than like a regular textbook. In order to have long-lasting impact on listeners, I believe in making things as simple as possible, boiling everything down to the essence, going straight to the point, and, most importantly, writing in an informal and hopefully entertaining way. The objective is for the listener to play this audiobook with anticipation of having a good educational time.

©2017 Ludovic Phalippou (P)2019 Ludovic Phalippou Personal Finance Banking Africa

Listeners also enjoyed...

 The Private Equity Playbook cover art
The Exit-Strategy Playbook cover art
Two and Twenty cover art
How to Invest cover art
Private Equity at Work cover art
The Dealmaker cover art
The Little Book of Big Dividends cover art
Liar's Poker cover art
99 Financial Terms Every Beginner, Entrepreneur & Business Should Know cover art
Alternative Investments 101 cover art
Diamonds in the Dust cover art
ETFs for the Long Run cover art
REIT Investing for Beginners cover art
Coffee Can Investing: The Low-Risk Road to Stupendous Wealth cover art
Why Does the Stock Market Go Up? cover art
How to Lead cover art
All stars
Most relevant
I attempted to listen to this audiobook for more than 4 hours, but learned nothing useful. It is impossible to follow for an educated lay person, due to excessive use of acronyms. Much better books on the subject include:

1. The Private Equity Playbook by Adam Coffey
Perspective: Operator / Insider
Tone: Strategic, enthusiastic, managerial
Coffey’s book is a crisp how-to manual for executives working within private equity-backed companies. He lays out what PE firms want, how they operate, and how CEOs can succeed under their ownership. The message? Play the game right, and everyone wins—especially the investors.
Key themes include:
“Value”-creation strategies and exits
Management incentives tied to growth
Private equity as a growth engine, not a villain
Coffey sees private equity as an efficient vehicle for scaling businesses, creating wealth, and driving professional success. What’s missing is any deep reflection on social costs, inequality, or accountability.

📕 2. Plunder by Brendan Ballou
Perspective: Legal insider / Critical observer
Tone: Analytical, cautionary, reform-minded
Ballou, a former federal prosecutor, lifts the lid on the systemic risks private equity poses. His approach is structural: he shows how PE firms legally and financially insulate themselves whilst offloading risk to workers, consumers, and the public.
Key concerns include:
Legal loopholes that shield PE firms from liability
Collapse of services in critical sectors (e.g., healthcare, nursing homes, prisons)
Failures of governments and regulators to step in
Where Coffey sees efficiency, Ballou sees extraction. He argues not that private equity is evil, but that it's poorly regulated, highly opaque, and deeply dangerous when applied to vital institutions.

📙 3. Bad Company by Megan Greenwell
Perspective: Journalist / Outsider
Tone: Narrative-driven, urgent, empathetic
Greenwell’s book tells the ground-level stories of people harmed by private equity ownership—employees in gutted companies, patients in mismanaged care, families evicted from neglected housing. Unlike Coffey or Ballou, she focuses less on mechanisms and more on consequences.
Key contributions:
Real-life reporting from the frontlines of financialised business
Spotlight on industries where private equity causes disproportionate harm
How corporate PR and media may silence or distort the public’s view
Greenwell is not content with analysis. She wants to show readers how abstract financial decisions translate into human suffering—and how that suffering is often invisible by design.

as per review at https://elonomate.co.uk/blog/-behind-the-curtain

Nonsensical to lay persons; excessive acronyms

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
You’re far better off buying the book. The audio is too hard to follow fault of bloated prose and endless jargon. The manuscript is just not written in a manner appropriately suited for reading aloud. It’s allegedly a teaching tool but the material is impossible to absorb in this format.

Not the way to learn this material

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
reminded me of private equity de-mystified; yet i found this one to be more enjoyable due to the storyline and the style of writing. the former focusing more on being informative and academically valid, this book has no less rigour in terms of academic ground and research based facts and arguments and has a good collection of case studies and historical examples.
people looking for advanced ideas, that is not the place but it will serve as a great all rounder to initiate anyone to PE.

very good all rounder

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.
The author has tried to make private equity accessible and easy to understand by explaining the entire things in terms of Alice in Wonderland. This is not only grating and patronising, but also confuses matters far more than a straightforward, grown-up explanation of private equity would be. A silly gimmick that fails utterly.

Attempt to make it accessible fails utterly

Something went wrong. Please try again in a few minutes.