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This is Part II of our Caesars Palace deep dive, and honestly, this is where things get truly unhinged. If Part I was the setup — the $30 billion LBO, the financial crisis, and the private equity firms scrambling to keep the lights on — this episode is the masterclass in what happens when the knives come out. We're breaking down the mechanics of distressed debt investing, restructuring, and bankruptcy. Above all, we'll explain how Apollo essentially invented a new playbook for stripping creditor rights that the entire industry now uses as standard operating procedure.

How do you move billions in assets out of a dying company and into a clean entity without the creditors being able to stop you? Who determines the value of what's being transferred when nobody is representing the other side? And how does Britney Spears end up at the literal center of a multibillion-dollar restructuring that kept this whole thing alive way longer than it should have survived?

And the biggest question of all (why we think this episode is mandatory listening right now): what happens when this playbook gets deployed AGAIN, today? We're already seeing the early signs: record levels of corporate debt coming due, earnings getting squeezed by higher rates, and redemption requests piling up. So what does creditor-on-creditor violence actually look like in practice? How do the alliances form and break? Why did the investors who got screwed the hardest in the Caesars saga end up being the biggest winners by the time the dust settled? And if you're sitting in any kind of debt instrument right now, how do you know whether you're the one holding the cards or the one about to get shut out in the cold?

Stay tuned for Part III, the conclusion of this 3-part series, where we'll be interviewing author and Financial Times reporter Sujeet Indap!

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Private credit is the crisis everyone's watching, but the real story -- and the one no one has been focused on -- is what private equity is doing behind the scenes.

In Part 1 of our 3-part series, Kristen and Jen break down the $30 billion leveraged buyout of Caesars by Apollo and TPG, the deal that became the blueprint for what we now call "creditor-on-creditor violence" and flipped everything everyone thought they knew about the relationship between debt and equity investors on its head.

This also happens to be the ultimate Private Equity & LBO deep dive as we start with the basics: what an LBO actually is, how it works, why private equity firms started to do club deals back in 2006/7 (hint...size) and how capital structures work at a high level.

From there, Jen and Kristen walk through the actual structure of the Caesars deal — $6B in equity from Apollo, TPG, and 30+ co-investors (everyone from Goldman Sachs to the Michael J. Fox Foundation to Bob Kraft), $7B in bank loans, $6B in bridge-to-high-yield bonds, and $6.5B in commercial mortgage-backed securities sitting at the PropCo level. They explain what an OpCo/PropCo mean in laymen's terms, why it let Apollo juice leverage, why club deals fell out of favor in favor of co-invest structures, and how today's mega-LBOs (Electronic Arts, the Ellison family's Warner Bros. Discovery play) stack up against what was historic in 2007.

This series is based on The Caesars Palace Coup by Sujeet Indap and Max Frumes — not sponsored, just genuinely one of the best case studies out there on LBOs and distressed debt investing.

Stay tuned for Part 2, where Jen and Kristen get into everything that went wrong, the asset-transfer shenanigans, and the birth of creditor-on-creditor violence and how Britney Spears was the linchpin that kept it all together...until it all unraveled with the biggest names in investing, Apaloosa, Eliott, Oak Tree, Oak Hill, Paulson and more got in the ring.

In Part 3, we sit down with Sujeet Indap of the Financial Times to talk about what the Caesars deal means for the private credit market today, and what exactly is going on with Caesars who is back in the news with Carl Icahn and billionaire Tilman Fertitta out with competing offers.

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Wealthfront.com/wss. This is a paid endorsement for Wealthfront. May not reflect others’ experiences. Similar outcomes not guaranteed. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. Rate subject to change. Promo terms apply. If eligible for the boosted rate of 4.15% offered in connection with this promo, the boosted rate is also subject to change if base rate decreases during the 3 month promo period.The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC ("Wealthfront Brokerage"), Member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. The Annual Percentage Yield ("APY") on cash deposits as of 11/7/25, is representative, requires no minimum, and may change at any time. The APY reflects the weighted average of deposit balances at participating Program Banks, which are not allocated equally. Wealthfront Brokerage sweeps cash balances to Program Banks, where they earn the variable APY. Sources HERE.

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Buckle up, because this week we're sitting down with Neha Champaneria Markle, who runs the Private Equity Solutions group at Morgan Stanley Investment Management.

Neha walks us through the entire private equity landscape and answers the questions you've been dying to ask an insider including:

- Is "AI is going to destroy software and therefore private equity"?
- Why are fundraising cycles getting longer?
- What does vintage year really tell you about a fund's performance?
- What's actually a "good" DPI, IRR, and TVPI
- Why does every fund somehow claim to be top quartile?

She also pulls back the curtain on subscription credit lines and how GPs use them to juice early IRRs, gives us a definition of "fund of funds" and "co-investment" that actually makes sense, and settles the score on whether PE investing is really just "volatility laundering".

As the walls around private equity are coming down, it’s important to understand which sectors are secretly crushing it, how managers actually get selected, the fee structures, and what the "democratization of private markets" really means for returns going forward.

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Shop our Self Paced Courses:

Investment Banking & Private Equity Fundamentals HERE
Fixed Income Sales & Trading HERE

Wealthfront.com/wss. This is a paid endorsement for Wealthfront. May not reflect others’ experiences. Similar outcomes not guaranteed. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. Rate subject to change. Promo terms apply. If eligible for the boosted rate of 4.15% offered in connection with this promo, the boosted rate is also subject to change if base rate decreases during the 3 month promo period.The Cash Account, which is not a deposit account, is offered by Wealthfront Brokerage LLC ("Wealthfront Brokerage"), Member FINRA/SIPC. Wealthfront Brokerage is not a bank. The Annual Percentage Yield ("APY") on cash deposits as of 11/7/25, is representative, requires no minimum, and may change at any time. The APY reflects the weighted average of deposit balances at participating Program Banks, which are not allocated equally. Wealthfront Brokerage sweeps cash balances to Program Banks, where they earn the variable APY. Sources HERE.