Giffon: Giant PE Firms Were Built on Debt Culture, Not Business Quality
Jeremy Giffon · Everything in Capital Markets is Downstream of Algorithms · Invest Like The Best · Jul 7, 2026 · at 45:10
Investor Jeremy Giffon discusses how the founding DNA of private equity giants like KKR, Blackstone, and Apollo affects modern financial culture.
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“The current paradigm in which we live, The largest and most important finance firms come out of a culture of leveraged buyout, which first of all, it's a debt driven idea. It's financial engineering. It's extractive insofar as the primary goal is to make a thing more profitable. And I'm not trying to disparage leverage buyouts. I don't think they're like as evil as people say, but the idea is like kind of The core idea behind it is like using debt and financial engineering to make a lot of money in a way that the quality of the business itself is maybe ancillary to the core trade.”
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