This grossly (and incorrectly) oversimplifies an enormous industry with a number of different approaches. Some PE firms absolutely strip the assets out of businesses and maximize their short term profits, while others buy and hold for the long term and others add value to companies they buy then sell them or take them public.

I hate the whole "PE is evil" attitude from people who don't understand it. Often there are headlines about how a PE firm has taken a firm over and fired hundreds or thousands of people, and the connotation is very much that they are evil and greedy for profit at the expense of people's livelihoods, while the reality is the business in its current form was going to fail and take everyone's job with it, and it was necessary to cut jobs in order to save the business (and thus save the jobs that remain).

I know the industry is an easy target because it's a bunch of rich guys and some of them are definitely greedy profiteers, but it's just unhelpful to label the whole industry based on those. If you go by that logic then the whole tech industry is very much evil because it exploits cheap labor (Uber, DoorDash, etc.).

In this case, they were given the kiss of death. Cerberus Capital right as/after they were done striping Chrysler to the bones. They used the same executive to do it, although his name eludes me now. Paid obnoxious amounts of money for niche brands like AAC, then immediately ran them into the ground. Failed to miss every single opportunity to make money by creating a military-only section that ad functionally identical guns they were selling on the civilian side in configurations people actually wanted. Dropped the ball on quality in every plant - then refocused almost everything to an Alabama facility where they continued to drop the ball but all together now. And just generally did everything wrong.

There have been so many chances to sell. The Navajo Nation offered almost a billion in 2014 or so, couple years later a friend of mine in that industry was on a team that looked into buying with another capital company that everyone here would know, and the books showed that the 250 million they were asking was extremely optimistic for their sales and debt.

I have no doubt someone will pick it up now, but at dirt cheap, for name and maybe 20 IP designs that will keep getting made. The 870 and some Marlins will stay, all of DPMS is probably gone, dumb things like the R51 will finally see the garbage pale. The military contracts are worth something, but they largely weren’t suppling much to US mil, except some precision rifle components, and suppressors, their M4 carbines were going overseas.

So... IDK. Left and right and all over just the wrong way to run a gun company.

This is popular to say, but doesn't hold up to reality.

An analysis of "17,171 worldwide leveraged buyout transactions that include every transaction with a financial sponsor in the CapitalIQ database announced between 1/1/1970 and 6/30/2007" found bankruptcy rates around 6% [1]. This isn't exceptionally high.

[1] https://pubs.aeaweb.org/doi/pdfplus/10.1257/jep.23.1.121 Table 2

Hilton went private as the last (big) deal before the 08 recession, went public again 5 years later...