Meet Silver Lake, the private equity firm making some major investments

Have you ever heard of Silver Lake

It's a private equity firm making big moves and scooping up some major companies

Silver Lake began in 1999, around the same time many private equity firms began coming around

Those firms basically take a pool of money from wealthy people to purchase stakes in privately held companies or purchase publicly traded companies

You can think of this as literally a private investment and the equity of the business

So let's say if you're an investor and I'm running a company and you want to invest in my company

I get the financing and you get the returns. So this is basically a good deal for the both of us

Silver Lake currently has more than $110 billion of combined assets. Their most recent was being a part of the purchase of video game company Electronic Arts

Now that's just one of the dozens of companies they've bought or invested in

including Waymo, Airbnb, Dell Technologies, and more. They also have heavily invested in several sports companies

Firms like Silver Lake are a new way for companies to get money, as opposed to traditional means like a bank

The end goal of all of these private equity funds is, in my opinion

a lot of it is to make high returns, right? And why do they need these high returns Because they need to justify their investors And investors in these private equity funds are all sorts of big institutional investors Take Electronic Arts

as an example. Each shareholder got $2.10 per share that they held, making the top shareholders

extremely wealthy. Then maybe from the cash I get, I can start another company and then do this

process again. That's how I become a serial entrepreneur, right, which I see happening a lot

Not only in media, but I would say technology and health care

So what if you're not a top shareholder or executive in your company and are an employee whose company is being bought by private equity

As an employee, I would be very worried. And it's not only about my job, right

It's also about the management changing. So let's say I have my job, but the management changes

And now suddenly I have a new boss. I am under a different payroll system, for example, and then I have different expectations

And then again, there's like, you know, this pressure of am I doing the right thing in my job

and now suddenly the goalpost changes. Silver Lake did not respond to Straight Arrow News' request for comment

For Straight Arrow News, I'm Lauren Keenan. If you want more on this story, download the Straight Arrow News app or visit san.com