Not all is destroyed. Some of the value is diverted to PE wallets. Setting 900k of someone else's value on fire in order to set up a updraft to push 100k into your pocket is a sweet, profitable deal for you.
I feel like this is the theme of our entire country at the moment: Many powerful people seem willing to torch stuff worth billions of dollars to the country as a whole in order to squeeze out a few million for themselves.
If we had a functioning regulatory environment... Haha. Nevermind. We vote for our leaders based on how loudly they promise to hurt trans kids.
Mostly? PE's original sin is being carpetbagger capitalism, exclusively focused on short-term profit. Without even the usual "Evil Corp" veneers of domain expertise, or emotional attachment to the underlying business and community.
I think we're talking about cashing out a company by prioritizing short term returns over long term survival (including insulting your customers, degrading the brand, committing borderline fraud, etc) . that's pretty orthogonal to broad structural inflation.
