Success Quote by Henry Kravis

Kravis reaches for marriage because it’s the one metaphor even finance can’t fully sterilize. Buying a company gets sold as a transaction - a clean swap of cash for control - but he’s warning that ownership is closer to a binding social contract with consequences that linger long after the champagne. In a world that loves the fantasy of optionality, “married” is a deliberately claustrophobic word: you don’t get to ghost a balance sheet, a workforce, a legacy pension plan, or a toxic culture just because the numbers stopped exciting you.

The repetition is the tell. “You are married. You are married to that company.” It’s not poetic; it’s insistence, like a partner saying, Don’t pretend this is casual. Kravis, synonymous with the leveraged buyout era, is also implicitly trying to reframe the caricature of the private equity raider as a hit-and-run artist. He’s signaling to CEOs, investors, and perhaps regulators that serious acquirers can’t treat companies as disposable assets. Debt covenants, reputational fallout, operational surprises - these are the in-laws.

The subtext is both sobering and self-justifying. Marriage implies duty, patience, and shared fate, but it also implies power: once “married,” you make the rules of the household. Kravis isn’t romanticizing corporate stewardship so much as stating a hard truth about control: acquisition collapses distance. Whatever the company is - messy, brilliant, broken - becomes your public identity and your private problem.