Hunter Hopcroft
speaker
537 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Mar 2025
last heard Mar 2025
Hunter Hopcroft’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
In any case, Apollo and TPG capital.
trying to do a thirty-one billion dollar leverage buyout of Hera's, which later becomes Caesars.
This starts in December 2006, and it's one of the largest leverage buyouts in gaming history.
Rowan has this grand strategy of reward points.
He's thinking of this like a traditional LBO.
They're going to come in, they're going to improve operations, and they're going to make a return by improving Caesar's operating.
But the deal closes in 2008 with $24 billion of debt and runs right into the jaws of the great financial crisis.
So by 2009, Caesars has a debt to EBITDA ratio of like 14x.
Apollo immediately sees the rain on the wall and starts trying to protect its equity value by moving assets off Caesar's balance sheet.
They're bullying junior creditors into swapping for equity and doing all sorts of aggressive esoteric strategies to try to preserve their investment.
And just like executive life, this leads to an incredibly long, protracted legal battle.
And by twenty nineteen, Apollo's is out of Caesars.
But this, and this is to me what really makes Apollo Apollo.
Two thousand and two, just four years after this Caesars fiasco finally winds down, Apollo partner David Samber, who was really central to the Caesars process, is back in Las Vegas speaking with the Nevada Gaming Control Board about Apollo's bid to acquire Las Vegas Sands and a portfolio of casinos in the Las Vegas Convention Center.
And the best part about this is that a giant part of the financing for that deal is effectively a sale lease back with Vici, which was a spin of Caesar's real estate assets during that whole process.
So, yes, Apollo's in the echelon with KKRs and Blackstone, but it's their appetite and willingness for this complexity.
And they're kind of, okay, that went poorly, but we learned and we're going back in with those learnings that I think.
think really sets them apart from somebody who would say, We got burned on that before.
It's too much reputational risk.
Apollo seems to have a really high appetite for taking on this reputational risk in the spirit of generating returns for their investors.
Showing 141–160 of 537 · page 8 of 27
← Previous
Next →