Barbarians At The Gate shows you how not to run a business and reveals the shocking greed of corporate America in the 1980s by telling the story of the leveraged buyout of RJR Nabisco.
Have you ever heard of the term yuppie? I had but wasn’t really familiar with what it meant. It’s a term that refers to people in the 1980s who were wealthy and flaunted it. They went to great lengths just to keep up their luxurious lifestyle and of course the appearance of such. Not my kind of people, but to each their own, right?

The epitome of what it meant to be a yuppie was the CEO of RJR Nabisco, Ross Johnson. You’ll learn of his story in Bryan Burrough’s Barbarians at the Gate: The Fall of RJR Nabisco. This book will also teach you all about what a leveraged buyout is and the sinister mechanisms behind it.

Here are the 3 most surprising lessons about corporate greed in America:

Leveraged buyouts (LBO’s) began as a way for wealthy people to avoid taxes but quickly became a way for big businesses to buy out others and get richer.
Rich people, like Ross Johnson, could use LBO’s to increase their wealth, but doing so hurt companies and the employees that worked for them.
Johnson continued a thriving career after losing the LBO deal for RJR Nabisco, but some people lost their fortunes in it.

Let’s dive right in to take a closer look!

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