Austin Kittelson

Ex-peach farmer & B2B tech guy turned auditor 🔎

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

ai entertainment is the Chuck-E-Cheese animatronics of the internet

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@explorersofai

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@explorersofai Harmless but reckless growth-like fun. For now

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@AmiEverAfter wut.

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@JustinRFrench So true, order matters. PEMDAS ftw!

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@AmiEverAfter Brutal. I may never know the plight of a short King, but I think this post captured most of it.

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@JustinRFrench @KevinSzabo14 You and community builders doing it transparently in public are the actual ones!

Stakeholder rhetoric, shareholder math. Disappointed to be a ClickUp customer.

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@JustinRFrench @KevinSzabo14 Don't envy Zeb's seat. Lucky to have built lean and leveraged these last 2+ years. That's why I won't grease the path for the next mass layoff or idolize these CEOs. Plenty to learn from them, but that's different from making them heroes.

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@JustinRFrench @KevinSzabo14 Better transitions exist (work-sharing, attrition, sharing the AI windfall with people whose roles got automated) but CEOs skip them because the math favors mass layoffs, which in many cases are still a choice made by an already profitable company.

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@AmiEverAfter THAT'S ANOTHER world record.

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@JustinRFrench Haha June gloom must be early? Emphasis on 'finally'

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@ifeanyi_we @Railway CODE BLACK ⚫

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

Austin is chopping it up

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@WSUCougarFB @Dhobbs92 Andrew Furney

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@ponziland @blondecapitalvc I hope the great folks from Hanford Washington can help out with that multi-state nuclear project 😅🫠

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

Did you literally actually use synergy in a property listing

[Felix Prehn 🐶 @felixprehn]

Private equity firms bought 500 hospitals. Death rates in their emergency rooms went up 13%. They fired 12% of the staff. Then they paid themselves billions in dividends.

A Harvard study just confirmed what doctors already knew: people are dying so investors can hit quarterly targets.

Exactly what happens. A PE firm buys a hospital using debt. The debt gets placed on the hospital's balance sheet, not the firm's. Now the hospital owes hundreds of millions it never borrowed. To service that debt, the hospital cuts costs. Costs mean nurses.

The numbers from the Harvard/University of Chicago study are horrifying. After PE acquisition, emergency department salary spending dropped 18.2%. ICU salary spending dropped 15.9%. Hospital-wide employees were cut 11.6%. Emergency department deaths rose 13%, seven additional deaths per 10,000 visits.

A separate study found patients undergoing surgery at PE-acquired hospitals had 17% higher odds of dying within 90 days.

Steward Health Care, owned by Cerberus Capital, filed bankruptcy with $9 billion in debt after closing hospitals across Massachusetts. The CEO lived on a $40 million yacht while emergency rooms went dark. Eight hospitals serving 2 million people nearly disappeared because a PE fund extracted more cash than the system could survive.

The private equity industry has poured over $1 trillion into healthcare. They operate a quarter of ERs nationwide. This isn't going away.

The investing angle nobody talks about.

Non-PE hospital operators like HCA Healthcare (HCA) and Tenet (THC) are the direct beneficiaries. Every time a PE hospital closes or deteriorates, patients flow to the nearest competitor. HCA has returned 1,200% since 2011. Patient volume from PE closures is a structural tailwind nobody's pricing in.

Medical staffing firms (AMN Healthcare, Cross Country) charge premium rates specifically because PE hospitals cut staff. The staffing shortage IS the business model for these companies.

The disruption play: outpatient surgical centers (SCA Health, now part of UnitedHealth) are pulling profitable procedures out of hospitals entirely. PE-owned hospitals lose their highest-margin surgeries to outpatient, and the death spiral accelerates.

Pull up tradevision and monitor healthcare M&A alerts, hospital closure filings, and patient volume migration data. When a PE-owned hospital announces "restructuring," the patient volume shift to competitors like HCA starts within 30 days. That 30-day window is when the competitor's earnings revisions haven't updated yet. Free to try.

(a private equity firm bought your local hospital. borrowed $500 million in the hospital's name. fired 12% of the nurses. emergency room deaths rose 13%. then they paid themselves dividends. nobody went to prison. they're currently buying another hospital.)

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@KaseyKourageous 🤣💀

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

They said what they said.

[Austin Kittelson @K2surplus]

@KyleAsay_ Forever a lifeguard 🛟