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Comment by linuxftw | Hacker News Reader

How much of Rackspace is even left? Is this just a cash grab by the company that took them private?

> As of March 31, 2020, we had $3,987.5 million face value of outstanding indebtedness

It's always a mystery to me how some firm can buy a company, and then push the debt from acquiring the company onto the company itself.

This is just vampire capitalism. Unfortunately, it makes no difference if individual investors here choose to invest, "index funds" will use everyone's retirement savings to funnel more cash to these parasites.

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> Is this just a cash grab by the company that took them private?

Absolutely. My uninformed ex-Rackspace-employee take is that Apollo Global Management just wants to raise more money to further run the company into the ground.

Rackspace's last quarterly statement (I believe) showed a Net Profit of $35.8M [1].

Compare this to their most recently quarterly numbers in the S-1:

> For the three months ended March 31, 2020, we had revenue of $652.7 million, a net loss of $48.2 million

Yeah, they grew revenue by around 20% over 5 years, but there was an $84M swing into the red!

You'd have to have a hole in your head to trust these crooks. Unfortunately, most of us have no choice, the 401k market is rigged.

1: https://www.investing.com/equities/rackspace-hosting-income-...

>"Unfortunately, most of us have no choice, the 401k market is rigged."

Can you elaborate on this? How is it rigged exactly?

Sure. Once a stock is listed on a major exchange, those stocks make their way into various index funds. 401ks most typically offer a very limited selection of funds there's no way for an individual to choose to own funds that exclude a particular company.

It's rigged in the sense that the banks know the stock is worthless, but if you grease the right palms, you get to IPO, and the money you receive from the IPO is not investors that believe in your company, it's the fund managers that are managing other people's money, and they don't care about fundamentals or sound investing. It's the political class siphoning money from the working class. Do you think Warren Buffet is going to participate in this IPO?

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