Franklin, Andrews, Kramer & Edelstein

[BullNBear52]

How the Twinkie Made the Super-Rich Even Richer

Across the nation in the summer of 2013, there was a feeding frenzy for Twinkies. The iconic snack cake returned to shelves just months after Hostess had shuttered its bakeries and laid off thousands of workers. The return was billed on “Today” as “the sweetest comeback in the history of ever.”

Nowhere was it sweeter, perhaps, than at the investment firms Apollo Global Management and Metropoulos & Company, which spent $186 million in cash to buy some of Hostess’s snack cake bakeries and brands in early 2013.

Less than four years later, they sold the company in a deal that valued Hostess at $2.3 billion. Apollo and Metropoulos have now reaped a return totaling 13 times their original cash investment.

Behind the financial maneuvering at Hostess, an investigation by The New York Times found a blueprint for how private equity executives like those at Apollo have amassed some of the greatest fortunes of the modern era.

Meet These Very-High-Earning Private Equity Executives

A joint study by The New York Times and Equilar, a board and executive data provider, examined the annual take-home pay of the top-ranking executives at the six private equity firms that are publicly traded. The findings were compared with a number of other industries, including large technology firms and banks. On average, the heads of the private equity firms earned nearly 10 times as much as the heads of banks.

http://www.nytimes.com/2016/12/10/business/dealbook/how-the-twinkie-made-the-super-rich-even-richer.html?