A Covid booster for everyone? - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

A Covid booster for everyone? - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

A Covid booster for everyone?

As the delta variant rips across the world, boosting coronavirus cases in vaccinated and unvaccinated populations alike, U.S. biotech billionaire Patrick Soon-Shiong thinks he has an answer: a universal booster shot that adds T-cells to the body’s armory against the pathogen. Most Covid vaccines aim to spark production of protective proteins called antibodies, but ImmunityBio, of which Soon-Shiong owns about 13%, will this quarter start testing a vaccine aimed at making T-cells, another important part of the immune response. ImmunityBio’s hAd5 vaccine will be tested as a booster in some of the 485,000 South African health workers who received the single-shot Johnson & Johnson dose as part of a trial known as Sisonke. Patrick Soon-Shiong Photographer: David Paul Morris/Bloomberg What Soon-Shiong and ImmunityBio hope to prove is that boosting both antibodies and T-cells will give lasting immunity and limit the breakthrough infections seen even in countries like the U.S. and U.K., where about half the population is fully vaccinated. They also plan to test delivery methods including capsules, oral droplets and a nasal spray — any of which might be easier to distribute in countries with limited infrastructure. Second-generation vaccine developers like ImmunityBio are looking for a role in fighting the pandemic after the success of messenger RNA shots from Moderna, the partnership of Pfizer and BioNTech, and adenovirus-based vaccines from AstraZeneca and J&J. Potent coronavirus variants such as delta, first identified in India, have provided an opportunity. Soon-Shiong faces competition from new vaccines planned by companies such as Sanofi. Established Covid-19 vaccine makers such as Pfizer are also planning their own boosters. South Africa’s Sisonke trial could be used to test those too, says Glenda Gray, co-leader of that study. South Africa-born Soon-Shiong is betting that, at least in Africa, his company is in pole position. He’s talking to local companies including the Biovac Institute about manufacturing collaborations, or may have ImmunityBio go it alone. Either way, it’s good news for a continent with extremely limited vaccine- production capacity and a population of 1.2 billion that’s lagging the world in Covid immunization.—Antony Sguazzin and Janice Kew

Portugal Tax Rates - Krushnar

(20+) Facebook

Hi all!

I know everyone here is excited about Portugal's "free" healthcare and paying very little to nothing to receive great care here. Many post about how "civilized" it is that healthcare is "free." I agree that PT's healthcare is very good and very affordable.

Some food for thought, PT healthcare is not "free." It has been (and is) paid for by Portuguese citizens and Portuguese businesses that pay extraordinarily high taxes in Portugal (higher than average EU), taxes that many immigrants/expats generally (realistically - no judgement, here) do not pay. It is a socialist system where the cost is shared but the burden falls primarily on PT workers and businesses.

Please know that the VAT/IVA paid on groceries (6%), electricity (13%), restaurant meals and general household items (up to 23%) does go to the government but it is a small share of the PT government piggy bank when compared to workers paying VAT plus personal income tax and and often, business taxes. Most have paid higher VAT rates in the recent past, and all have paid VAT for more time than those of us recent residents.

Below is the personal income tax rate in Portugal. I know some are not happy about the recent NHR 10% tax on a RothIRA and similar US investments. But as you can see by the chart, this 10% is less than what most workers pay -- and who, on average, live on less.

"In Portugal, the average household net-adjusted disposable income per capita is USD 21 203 a year, lower than the OECD average of USD 33 604 a year. There is a considerable gap between the richest and poorest – the top 20% of the population earn nearly six times as much as the bottom 20%." (OECD Better Life Index)

This means the average household in Portugal pays a 35% tax rate with €2,515 as their highest possible deduction level. Portuguese citizens making €36,968+ per year are taxed at 45%. If you make over €80k, you're taxed an additional 2.5-5% "solidarity rate" -- meaning the government views that if you're doing well, you need to pay more to support your fellow citizens who are not. The lowest personal income rate in Portugal is 14.5% for those making over ~€4k per year.

Corporate/business tax rates in Portugal are equally high -- set to pay for the system that supports 10M people. Portugal is composed of 99% SMEs -- small and medium-sized businesses -- not large corporations. The average SME in PT employs 2.9 people. These businesses pay 34% social security tax per employee - on top of their 21% corporate revenue-based tax. A 1-person small business in Portugal pays 11% out of pocket each month for their "employee" SS and another 23% from gross revenue to pay for the "business share" of SS. (I know this well. I do this every month.)

I know many of us pay taxes on property purchases, on luxury goods, on tourism services - which is great. We all want PT to do well so we can stay here for as long as we want, and as they let us. There's no "almoço livre" I hope everyone remembers that PT's valued healthcare isn't free.

Last note: I'll be the first to say I wish PT would reduce business tax rates as they encourage corruption and discourage foreigner business setup. But when I look at these numbers, I see the money that supports where I live has to come from somewhere. Not being a tax policy expert, I don't know what to suggest.

Xi Jinping set out to save the Communist Party. But critics say he made himself its biggest threat - CNN

Xi Jinping set out to save the Communist Party. But critics say he made himself its biggest threat - CNN

Xi Jinping set out to save the Communist Party. But critics say he made himself its biggest threat

Analysis by Ben Westcott and CNN staff

Updated 0246 GMT (1046 HKT) July 26, 2021

Hong Kong (CNN)In January 2013, months after taking the helm of China's ruling party, Xi Jinping gathered the country's top politicians and asked them why the Communist Party of the Soviet Union had collapsed.

Xi, of course, already had the answer.

"It completely denied Soviet history, the history of the Soviet Communist Party, denied Lenin, denied Stalin," he said. "Party organizations at all levels had almost no effect, and the army was not there."

Nine years later, none of the above apply to the Chinese Communist Party (CCP).

As general secretary, Xi has returned the CCP to the center of Chinese life. Citizens celebrate the party's much-edited history en masse at packed Red tourism sites, its founder Mao Zedong enjoys a new reverence, and once-dormant grassroots party cells have been revitalized. Since 2015, Xi has embarked on a widespread program of military reforms and modernization.

But as Xi moved to consolidated the party's power, he took great lengths to guarantee his own.

He has axed the two-term limit on the Chinese presidency, introduced in 1982 to prevent the rise of a dictatorship, accumulated more titles than any CCP leader in recent decades, and created his own eponymous ideology, instilled in the party constitution.

Now experts in elite Chinese politics are warning that in trying to revitalize the CCP, Xi conflated himself with the party so totally he created another threat to its existence: himself.

Cai Xia, a former professor at the top training school for CCP officials, who now lives abroad and is a staunch party critic, said by concentrating power Xi had "killed the party as an organization." Its 95 million members, she said, are "slaves of his will."

Xi Jinping, general secretary of the Communist Party of China (CPC) Central Committee and chairman of the CPC Central Military Commission (CMC), lays a wreath to the statue of late Chinese leader Deng Xiaoping in Shenzhen on December 11, 2012.

Party structures

When Xi laid a wreath before a bronze statue of former paramount leader Deng Xiaoping, in Shenzhen, weeks after assuming office in November 2012, to many the message was obvious.

The southern manufacturing powerhouse was where Deng had famously pioneered China's era of economic reform up in the late 1970s. Xi, pundits predicted, was offering a sign of things to come.

After all, his late father, Xi Zhongxun, had been a revolutionary veteran and liberal-minded leader. After being persecuted and jailed during the Cultural Revolution, Xi Zhongxun was handpicked by Deng to govern Guangdong province and oversee the creation of Shenzhen as a special economic zone. Many observers expected Xi to follow in his father's footsteps.

They were all wrong. It soon turned out Xi had a very different kind of reform in mind -- one that would put the party and country on a significantly different path from the one set out on by Deng.

When Xi took office, outwardly China seemed stronger than it had been for decades. It had joined the World Trade Organization, held the 2008 Beijing Olympics and overtaken Japan as the world's second-largest economy.

From the inside, Xi saw a party beset by weak leadership, intense infighting, rampant corruption, lax discipline and faltering faith. "Xi came to power in the face of fragmentation of power within the party," said Cai, a former professor at the Central Party School in Beijing.

Xi's predecessor, Hu Jintao, was widely seen as a weak leader. That, combined with the collective leadership style installed after Mao, had allowed the nine members of the Politburo Standing Committee -- the party's innermost circle -- to each cultivate their own turf of unrivaled power. The result was difficult decision-making processes and serious infighting, with factions vying for their own interests, Cai said.

Xi's solution was simple -- and radical. He opted for a return to one-man rule. "He used the wrong way to solve the original problem, and made things worse," Cai said.

Soon after he came into office, Xi unleashed a sweeping anti-corruption campaign, which not only targeted corrupt officials, but also his political enemies. He oversaw the spectacular downfall of powerful figures such as Zhou Yongkang, a former Politiburo Standing Committee member and security czar who was jailed for life, and Xu Caihou, a top army general who died of cancer after being expelled from the party. In less than nine years, 392 senior officials and millions of party cadres have been investigated. Those left knew total loyalty was required for survival.

To further concentrate power into his own hands, Xi set up more than a dozen "central leading groups" to oversee important policy areas, including military reform, cybersecurity, finance and foreign policy. A relic from the Mao era, these informal bodies are secretive, and almost never publicize full lists of their members. From what's been revealed in state media reports, Xi personally heads at least seven of them, and many of his loyalists hold important positions.

"The party's collective leadership has become a concept in name only, and Xi has become the personification of the party."

Cai Xia, former professor at top CCP training school

These groups not only made policy decisions, but also coordinated their implementation. "In reality, these leading groups have replaced the normal mechanisms through which the party and the government operate," Cai said.

In 2015, he silenced internal dissent. A revised version of the party's disciplinary regulations banned "groundless criticism of the party center's decisions and policies." A year later, Xi was anointed the title of "core" leader, putting him on par with past strongmen like Mao and Deng. "The party's collective leadership has become a concept in name only, and Xi has become the personification of the party center," Cai said.

Aleksandra Kubat, an elite China politics expert at the Lau China Institute at King's College London, said dismantling institutional processes and adopting a "personalistic leadership style" had created "a lot of resentment" in the party towards Xi. In the long term, that "may prove detrimental for its stability," she said.

Concentrating so much power around Xi comes with another problem -- it leaves little space in which to groom a successor.

Chinese President Xi Jinping, center, attends a military parade with former presidents Hu Jintao, left, and Jiang Zemin in Tiananmen Square in Beijing on October 1, 2019.

'Succession crisis'

Xi's ascension to the top of the CCP wasn't a surprise. All the signs had been there for years.

He joined the Standing Committee in 2007 as the son of a former Communist Party leader, with governing experience in a major province. Most importantly, he was young enough to stay in power for two terms without turning 68, the loosely-enforced age of retirement for the party's top leaders.

Now, with one year to go before Xi would normally be expected to hand off power in 2022, there is no one on his Standing Committee similarly qualified -- all members are either too old or underprepared.

It is seen as the clearest sign yet that Xi, now age 68, intends to stay for three terms in office -- at least. Nis Grunberg, senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin, said it was possible there would be hints at a successor to Xi at the 20th Party Congress in 2022, but nothing could be taken for granted.

"We don't know how power structures and alliances will develop over the next five years ... But I think it's fair to say that the succession problem is kind of building in pressure the longer he stays," said Grunberg.

Xi hasn't just failed to appoint a successor. Experts said Xi has almost completely dismantled the system of succession put in place after Mao's death to ensure the party's longevity.

"I think it's fair to say that the succession problem is kind of building in pressure the longer he stays."

Nis Grunberg, senior analyst at the Mercator Institute for China Studies in Berlin

In 2018, the CCP removed all term limits on the country's presidency, allowing Xi to rule for life if he wanted to. The CCP said the move was necessary to bring the three most-powerful positions in China into alignment -- CCP general secretary and the chair of the Central Military Commission, also titles held by Xi, are not subject to term limits.

In a report for the Lowy Institute in April, China politics experts Richard McGregor and Jude Blanchette said Xi had built his own power "at the expense of the most important political reform of the last four decades: the regular and peaceful transfer of power."

"In doing so, he has pushed China towards a potential destabilizing succession crisis," the report said.

Two high-ranking politicians who had been once touted by multiple experts as potential successors to Xi have been quickly sidelined. Sun Zhengcai, former party secretary of Chongqing, was in 2018 convicted of bribery and imprisoned for life. Vice Premier Hu Chunhua, was not promoted into the Standing Committee of the Politburo in 2017, stalling his rise.

Some of the most high-profile leaders Xi has put in major positions of power are too old to succeed him, including Vice Premier Liu He, 69, and Vice President Wang Qishan, 73.

Carl Minzner, a professor in law at Fordham Law School in the United States, said if the criteria for promotion shifted from a focus on competence to an emphasis on personal loyalty to Xi, it could lead to a generation of weak, unprepared leaders.

"In the '80s or the '90s there was a degree of 'Show me what you can do,'" he said. "I worry that what's happening now is that the game starts to be 'Show me how loyal you are to me personally.'"

Xi Jinping sits on the far left at the G20 (Group of Twenty) summit meeting in Osaka, June 29, 2019.

Internationally isolated

Xi's bullish policies aren't just weakening the party internally -- they are compromising its standing internationally.

Recent surveys from around the world have shown China's reputation is at its lowest point in decades.

A Pew survey published in October 2020 found negative attitudes towards China have soared over the past few years in multiple European, Asian and North American countries, partly due to its handling of the Covid-19 pandemic.

At the same time, Xi has called for China to retake its place as a major global power alongside the United Kingdom, the United States and Russia.

A new generation of diplomats, nicknamed "wolf warriors" after a patriotic Chinese film series of the same name, are driving this foreign policy, fiercely responding to any perceived slight against the party and its leadership.

Xi himself has embraced that style. In his speech marking the 100th anniversary of the CCP this month, he warned any foreign countries who tried to bully China "will find their heads bashed bloody against a great wall of steel."

Mercator Institute's Grunberg said China had a view that the US and its global influence were in decline and this was Beijing's chance to assert itself more forcefully. "But, of course, the way that China tries to address this ... that's very much shaped by Xi Jinping and that's done in a way that received not well (internationally)," he said.

At the G7 meeting in June, the world's largest advanced economies issued their strongest denunciation of China in decades. A major investment deal between the European Union and China is at risk after sanctions imposed by Beijing on EU officials. Australia is calling for investigations into Beijing's handling of the Covid-19 pandemic, and India is banning Chinese apps over security concerns and sending troops to its shared border with China.

During four years of isolationist policies under former US President Donald Trump, the Chinese government failed to bring a single American ally closer into its orbit -- a sign of how poorly Beijing's Wolf Warrior diplomacy has been received internationally.

In a recent essay in Foreign Affairs, Yan Xuetong, dean of the Institute of International Relations at Tsinghua University, said Beijing deliberately rejected new military alliances to avoid being drawn accidentally into armed conflicts.

It is unclear who would be interested in signing such a treaty with Beijing in the current climate.

With a more assertive China, Biden faces growing tensions in Asia 03:22

The future of the Party

The longer Xi stays in power, the harder it will be for him to stand down.

Richard McGregor, senior fellow at the Lowy Institute, wrote in his book "Xi Jinping: The Backlash" that if Xi stepped aside the enemies the Chinese leader made in his brutal anti-corruption campaign, and his subsequent power grab, would likely be waiting to pounce.

"In a virtuosic display of circular logic, (Xi's supporters) maintain that the appointment of a successor would therefore cause instability, rather than the other way around," McGregor wrote.

Given that risk, Xi might choose to stay in power for the foreseeable future, or alternatively choose to hand over some of his positions to a successor but remain the puppetmaster, in a similar fashion to Deng in the 1980s and '90s.

For now, the CCP might not be at immediate risk of collapsing or losing its grip on power, in the same way the Communist Party of the Soviet Union came crashing down in 1990. But experts said Xi's policies threatened to leave future leaders less prepared to tackle the rising problems facing China, such as slowing economic growth, a falling birth rate and strategic competition with the US.

And there is no question that whoever takes over will have the specter of Xi looming over them, said former CCP professor Cai.

"After he amassed so much power and made so many mistakes, he's embarking on a self-destructive path of no return," she said.

Big US implications from Israel - YouTube

Big US implications from Israel - YouTube

3 weeks Israel

better is 8-10 weeks UK

Microsoft vandalism - This cold war needs ping-pong - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

This cold war needs ping-pong - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Digital vandalism is a serious provocation—a casus belli under some circumstances—and the cyberattack on Microsoft Exchange affected tens of thousands of companies.

The episode recalled the massive cyberattacks on Google just over a decade ago, when intruders came close to stealing the company’s source code, prompting it to pull its search engine from China. But whereas Google had numerous run-ins with Chinese censors before exiting, Microsoft has sought to be a model of corporate compliance in China, where it operates its largest research and development center in the world outside the U.S.

So, if Microsoft can be treated by Beijing in this way, the thinking is that no U.S. company can consider itself safe.

U.S. Secretary of State Antony Blinken, commenting on the attacks, condemned what he called “digital authoritarianism,” a framing that echoed President Joe Biden’s way of looking at U.S.-China competition as a “democracies-versus-autocrats” struggle for global leadership in the 21st century.

Medicare cost savings - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Delta variant is spoiling New York’s wild summer - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Instead of adding dental and vision benefits to Medicare, as the Democrats want to do, we should first expand Medicare to everybody, Noah Smith argues. This will leverage Medicare’s cost advantage to make health care even cheaper. We can add the other stuff to it after that.

Further Reading

Money Stuff: Private Equity Firm Got Rich Making Private Equity Firms Rich - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Money Stuff: Private Equity Firm Got Rich Making Private Equity Firms Rich - btbirkett@gmail.com - Gmail

Blue Owl

A sneakily important fact of finance is that if you make $10 million a year, you make $10 million a year, but if you own a company that makes $10 million a year, it’s worth at least, say, $100 million. A stream of income is worth some multiple of a year’s income, depending on things like interest rates and how risky the income is and how much it is expected to grow; I am going to use a multiple of 10x for simplicity but real numbers will vary. (The price/earnings ratio of the S&P 500 index right now is about 29.6x; a company with that multiple and a $10 million annual net income would be worth $296 million.)

This means that if you are in some money-making business, it might be a good idea to sell a portion of your business. If you make $10 million a year, and the right multiple on your earnings is 10 times, then you own a $100 million business. If you sell 20% of that business to someone else, then that gets you several benefits:

1. You have $20 million to spend on houses, boats, etc., right now. (Of course, now you only get $8 million a year from your business; the buyer gets the other $2 million. But you get more money now.) 
2. You are richer than you were. Before you sold a stake, you were making $10 million a year; presumably you put some of that in the bank etc., but you were also paying taxes and stuff and it would take many years for you to accumulate $100 million. Now you have $20 million, and an 80% stake in a $100 million business; your net worth is $100 million more than it was. Of course this isn’t true; before selling the stake, you owned 100% of this same business, which was presumably worth $100 million. But no one is quite going to believe you that it’s a $100 million business until you sell the stake; selling the stake is what validates it as a $100 million business and makes you a centimillionaire. In particular, selling a minority stake of a business is a traditional way to become “a billionaire”: You have some high-eight-figure-ish annual income with good prospects for more,[1] you are rich but not a billionaire, but then you package that income into a company and sell a minority stake at a billion-dollar valuation and, bam, you get the “billionaire” title.[2] None of this is economically important — the income stream is what it is, etc. — but it can be psychologically important.
3. You have taken some risk off the table: If the business crashes tomorrow, you don’t get your $10 million (or $8 million) a year anymore, but you get to keep the $20 million. Your new co-owner shares the risk of the business with you.
4. You save on taxes. Probably the $10 million a year that you were making before was taxed as ordinary income, at relatively high rates. But when you sell 20% of your business for $20 million, that's capital gains: That's not income for your labor (taxed at high rates), but rather an increase in the value of stock that you own in your business (taxed at lower rates).[3] By selling a stake in your business you get to transmute ordinary income into capital gains.[4]

This is very straightforward stuff, but it is finance-y stuff; it is stuff that not everyone knows or thinks about. So there is a business of just going around to people who run their own prosperous businesses and telling them this. You run a private equity firm, you go to family businesses or doctors' practices or whatever, you say “hey you could work for the next 10 years and get paid for your work and pay taxes on your income, or you could sell a portion of that income to us in advance, get money now, save on taxes, and mark your wealth to market so you can tell people that you’re really rich.” And the doctors or whoever are like “huh I never thought of that, give me the money,” and you’ve got a good trade. The tax advantages alone — converting future ordinary income into present capital gains — can make it a good deal for both sides.

One thing is that, if you do run a private equity firm that does this sort of trade, a lot of your income comes in the form of recurring management fees on the private equity funds that you run. These fees are taxed as ordinary income, and the main purpose of most private equity managers' lives is to turn ordinary income into capital gains.[5] Another life purpose is of course becoming a billionaire. And so you might look around and say … wait a minute, I am buying stakes in family businesses so their owners can get nominally richer and optimize their taxes; who will buy a stake in my business so I can be nominally richer and optimize my taxes?

And the answer is Michael Rees:

Until Michael Rees became a billionaire this year, he was arguably the most popular man on Wall Street. ...

In little more than a decade the firm that Rees co-owned, Dyal Capital, has paid out well over $10bn to buy minority stakes in some of the best-performing companies in finance. He has forked out hundreds of millions of dollars to the founders of private equity firms including Silver Lake and Providence Equity; to hedge fund managers including Jana Capital; and to firms such as Golub Capital and Owl Rock, which are displacing banks as chief lenders to a swath of corporate America.

That is from this delightful Financial Times profile of Rees and Dyal, which “gives top financiers a way to convert their paper fortunes into cash and potentially lower their tax bills.”

But then if you are Michael Rees, and you are in the business of buying stakes in private equity firms so their owners can get nominally richer and optimize their taxes, you might look around and say … wait a minute, who will buy a stake in my business so I can be nominally richer and optimize my taxes? And the answer is a complicated three-way merger involving a special purpose acquisition company that allowed Dyal Capital to go public as part of Blue Owl Capital Inc.:

This year Rees, 46, became a billionaire in his own right. Having started Dyal in 2011 as an experimental division on the fringes of asset manager Neuberger Berman, he broke free of his parent company and pulled off a $12bn transaction that amounts to one of the biggest ever stock market debuts by a US private capital group. The enlarged company, known as Blue Owl, instantly achieved a market capitalisation close to that of Carlyle Group, Ares Management and other more established rivals.

He “became a billionaire” in this strictly nominal sense: He had a stream of income before, and he has that stream of income now, but having sold a stake in it at a multibillion-dollar valuation, now he’s a billionaire.

Anyway the Blue Owl deal was hotly controversial because, if you are an alternative investment manager in the business of taking minority stakes in alternative investment managers, eventually there are going to be conflicts of interest. Specifically, Dyal owned stakes in a couple of private credit funds called Sixth Street Capital and Golub Capital, and the three-way merger that created Blue Owl involved not just a SPAC but also another private credit fund named Owl Rock:

Even some executives close to the deal acknowledge it appears rife with conflict.

A Dyal fund had previously invested $500m in Owl Rock, before it merged with Dyal. It meant that Rees and Ward were now managing a fund that is also one of the biggest shareholders in their own firm. While the investors in Dyal’s funds are still waiting for an opportunity to cash out, the stock market listing has already given Rees and Ward big payouts of their own.

The sharpest objections came from executives at Sixth Street and Golub Capital, who were unhappy that Dyal — one of their biggest shareholders — was merging with Owl Rock, one of their most formidable rivals. They characterised the transaction as a “betrayal” that would put their confidential financial information in the hands of a competitor. And insisted that their deal with Dyal gave them a power of veto.

It did not. Golub and Sixth Street sued, claiming that transfer restrictions in their contract with Dyal prevented Dyal from merging; Delaware and New York courts disagreed. Also the worries about betrayal do not seem particularly real; the Delaware court found that “this litigation and the parallel action in New York were part and parcel of a calculated effort to ‘muck up’ the Transaction to force a buyback” of Dyal’s stakes in Golub and Sixth Street on cheap terms:

After learning of the Transaction, in December 2020, Sixth Street’s senior executives assured their investors that the Transaction would have “zero impact on our business” because Dyal III was a “completely passive investor” run by “good folks.” And importantly, they emphasized that Dyal “[does not] get competitively sensitive information from us in any real sense,” and that “whatever information they [Dyal] get will be manag[ed]” with “informational firewalls.” Accordingly, David Stiepleman, Sixth Street’s Co-President and Chief Operating Officer, stated that he was “not particularly concerned about the theoretical possibility of [Owl Rock as] a smaller firm in the credit space seeing [Sixth Street’s] info.” Sixth Street reiterated its lack of concern on multiple occasions, assuring investors that Dyal III was a “[p]assive 10% owner of Sixth Street” and there was “nothing [to be] concerned about at all” with respect to the Transaction. …

Since filing, nothing in the record indicates Sixth Street ever actually became concerned about its confidential information. ... In his deposition, Alan Waxman, Sixth Street’s CEO, testified that “[Blue Owl is] not getting our pipeline. They’re not going to be involved in our investment process.”

It’s good to sell a stake in your business to get cash and be rich, but the downside is that if your business keeps growing, you have given up some of the upside. If you can buy it back cheap, you might as well try.