PE is the Ticketmaster of finance. They charge a bunch of fees, take a bunch of money, take all of the heat, and quietly funnel the money back to the founder/early investors/etc. who sold out but don't want you to know.
>and quietly funnel the money back to the founder/early investors/etc. who sold out but don't want you to know.
I don't understand this attitude. If you're in the arts I can understand why you don't want to be a "sellout", but founders/investors? Isn't the point literally to sell out?
Some founders are legitimately in it for the long haul and treat working for the company they founded as their career. I don't know how common they are, but I was lucky to work for one for about a decade.
The fact that they own and operate a lot of sites that present themselves as part of the secondary market, and sell first-release tickets there, is not widely publicised; nor is the fact that many of the bullshit fees they attach to ticket sales are actually at the artist's request and paid to them.