Rover Group Inc. - ROVR

Blackstone hits the bid

Though it doesn’t happen very often, there are times when a private equity buyer or another company decides to step up and hit the bid on an idea. It absolutely sucks, but it does happen.

There are likely more, but a couple of past ideas that come to mind happened during periods of incredible froth in the market: the acquisition of Realogy (currently HOUS) by Apollo back before the great financial crisis, and a decade before that (early in my career) Greentree Financial was purchased by Conseco in the runup to the year 2000 and great internet bubble. Apollo went through a very stressful 5 or so years before finally unloading a highly indebted Realogy back onto the public markets, while Conseco went on to file for bankruptcy a few years after closing their merger. Are we currently in one of those moments? Only time will tell.

As an aside, I find private equity buyers to be the more annoying buyers. When Conseco bought Greentree or Hewlett Packard made their ill-fated $11B Autonomy purchase back in 2011, critics of either company were able to transfer their positions over to Conseco or Hewlett Packard; when a private equity buyer steps up, it’s just over.

Needless to say, ROVR will be departing my interest list the next time I choose to update it.