“We’ve Been Sold a Story That Isn’t Remotely True”: How Private-Equity Billionaires Killed the American Dream

June 9, 2025

In the canon of spectacular resignations, Megan Greenwell’s is up there.

On her last day as editor in chief of the beloved sports blog Deadspin, Greenwell published a blistering essay on the site about her soon-to-be former bosses at the private-equity firm Great Hill Partners, which had acquired Deadspin and other former Gawker properties earlier in 2019. In the essay, Greenwell accused Great Hill of undermining Deadspin’s staff at every turn and seeking a “quick cash-out” on its investment.

And it wasn’t just happening at Deadspin, Greenwell explained: “A metastasizing swath of media is controlled by private-equity vultures and capricious billionaires and other people who genuinely believe that they are rich because they are smart and that they are smart because they are rich, and that anyone less rich is by definition less smart.”