Are there lessons here? I’m not entirely sure. It’s certainly a rags-to-riches story of a self-made man, and a very entertaining and honest one. Whether it provides any insights into the world of private equity is less clear to me.

Hands made his money from corporate takeovers followed by ruthless cost-cutting and asset-stripping. This is good for him, possibly good for the next buyer – and utterly tragic for everyone else concerned, whose jobs are eliminated or consolidated with scarcely a backward glance, and the excuse that the companies would have failed anyway. That might be true, but it’s not a certainty, and it can only happen in a culture where everything has been financialised without any broader responsibilities being taken (or even admitted to exist). Hands’ later philanthrophy has to be set against this.

It all rather crashes down when Hands buys a record company, perhaps the epitome of a company whose value comes predominantly from the people it employs and not (as had been the rationale for the deal) from the back catalogue of hits. It shows how different companies and industries can be, flying in the face of the simplifications of finance that they can all be treated the same. Maybe that’s the lesson, albeit possibly an unintended one.

3/5. Finished Monday 2 June, 2025.

(Originally published on Goodreads.)