Silver Lake

Intelsat

$16.8B LBO ($15.3B debt / $1.5B equity). Stock lost 90%+. Technology disruption + impossible debt load.

Bankrupt May 2020. Silver Lake marked investment down 90% (-21% annualized return).

SolarWinds

Taken private at $4.5B by Thoma Bravo + Silver Lake, IPO'd in 2018. Then the Sunburst hack — one of the worst nation-state cyberattacks in history — hit while Silver Lake was still a major holder. Silver Lake dumped $315M in stock 6 days before public disclosure. SEC investigated the suspicious timing. The company whose IT monitoring tools were embedded in 18,000+ government and corporate networks became the attack vector.

Silver Lake sold ~$1B in stock days before the 2020 Russian hack disclosure. SEC investigated. Stock cratered 40%. Silver Lake slowly exiting.

SunGard Data Systems

SEVEN PE firms needed to buy SunGard for $11.3B. The largest PE club deal by number of sponsors. Loaded with $7.2B in debt. Cloud computing disrupted the on-premise financial software model, and the company couldn't invest in technology under the debt load. Sold piecemeal — FIS acquired the financial services unit for $9.1B (below LBO price), other divisions sold or shuttered. When seven of the world's smartest firms all agree on a deal and still lose money, maybe the model is the problem.

Effectively dismantled. Sold to FIS in 2015 for $9.1B — 20% below LBO price. PE consortium lost billions.

Dell Technologies

Silver Lake and Michael Dell took Dell private for $24.9B in 2013. Unlike most PE deals, the founder stayed and actually ran the business. Dell acquired EMC for $67B (the largest tech deal ever), then returned to public markets. Silver Lake made ~3x. But this is the exception that proves the rule: PE worked because the founder was in charge, not financial engineers. Dell succeeded despite the PE model, not because of it. Silver Lake's contribution was the financing structure. Dell's contribution was actually running the company.

Public. Market cap ~$50B. Silver Lake made 3x+. One of the few PE tech mega-deals that worked — mostly because Michael Dell ran it, not PE.

Avaya Holdings

TPG and Silver Lake bought Avaya for $8.2B in 2007, loading $6.2B in debt onto a telecom equipment company in structural decline. Cloud communications (Zoom, Teams, RingCentral) was eating the legacy business. Filed Chapter 11 in 2017, emerged with reduced debt. Filed AGAIN in 2023 — the exact same problem, just a slightly smaller debt load and an even more disrupted industry. Two bankruptcies, $8.2B in value destroyed. TPG and Silver Lake learned nothing from the first bankruptcy.

Bankrupt TWICE (2017, 2023). Two PE-driven bankruptcies in six years. Brand destroyed.