``You can sell it to Berkshire, and we'll put it in the Metropolitan Museum; it'll have a wing all by itself; it'll be there forever,'' he says at the February meeting.
``Or you can sell it to some porn shop operator, and he'll take the painting and he'll make the boobs a little bigger and he'll stick it up in the window, and some other guy will come along in a raincoat, and he'll buy it.''
-Warren Buffett
I know Warren is talking down the bidding pressure that PE firms might put on the price he has to pay for privately held businesses but looking at his comments on PE over the years it's more than that:
He actually loathes private equity and its practitioners.
From the Los Angeles Times Money & Co. blog:
The century-old fruit company Harry & David filed for bankruptcy protection Monday morning.
Harry & David, famous for its Oregon comice pears and its fruit-of-the-month boxes, has been struggling to make payments on debt that was loaded onto the company when it was bought by a New York private equity firm in 2004.
The financial downturn also affected the company's sales.
"There’s no doubt that the debt payments are a huge factor," said Renee Fellman, an Oregon turnaround expert who has been following the company. "But on top of that, they have declining margins, increasing competition and many reports of bad customer service -- including yours truly."
Under Chapter 11 protection, Harry & David will continue operations -- sending out its fruit boxes as planned -- and exchange its bonds for equity in the company.I should do a post about Buffett and private equity, it would be about as close to ribald as Warren gets.
Wasserstein & Co., the private equity owners of Harry & David, tried to turn things around last year by laying off hundreds of employees and bringing in new, and somewhat controversial, outside executives....MORE
