The Caesars Palace Coup

From the Vegas Strip to Wall Street boardrooms, Chicago courthouses, and the halls of Congress, modern corporate titans collide in this explosive true story of how private equity firm Apollo Global Management's thirty-billion-dollar buyout of Caesars Entertainment turned into unprecedented bankruptcy of the gaming empire.



In the bestselling tradition of Michael Lewis's The Big Short and Ben Mezrich’s Bringing Down the House, journalists Max Frumes and Sujeet Indap deliver a page-turning account of a Las Vegas casino heist executed not by gangsters or con men, but rather by Wall Street tycoons. After an MIT math wizard turned a once sleepy casino chain into the biggest gaming company in the world, headlined by the storied Caesars Palace, two of the most storied private equity firms in the world swooped in and took control in a blockbuster buyout.



The deal closed.



Then, the global economy went into its worst meltdown since the Great Depression.



Caesar’s Palace Coup follows the jokers, kings, and called bluffs of the modern distressed-debt-investing world as the two firms executed a series of brilliant, if edgy, transactions to keep their investment afloat while waiting for Sin City and Atlantic City to bounce back. On the other side of those trades were loan and bondholders—cutthroat hedge funds—who believed that they held the cards . . . the company’s two dozen casinos now belonged to them. The spectacular 2015 bankruptcy of America’s biggest gaming empire, started a two-year knockdown, drag-out brawl among billionaires—deftly narrated by the authors—for rightful control of Caesars Entertainment.



This is modern Wall Street where the new raiders and barbarians scoop up corporate loans and bonds not to make a nice interest rate but to take private equity juggernauts head-on. It’s cut-throat, multilevel competition enacted by powerful investors used to getting their own way. And as this book takes the consequences one step further, there are devastating, true impacts of the upheaval wrought by these actions. It’s a treacherous game. Roll the dice.