In Part 3 of our Caesars Palace Coup series, we're back with Sujeet Indap of the Financial Times — co-author of the definitive book on the $30 billion LBO disaster — to connect the dots between 2008's creditor-on-creditor violence and the private credit tremors rattling markets right now. Caesars itself is back on the auction block, with Tilman Fertitta's Golden Nugget circling alongside a potential management buyout involving Tom Reeg and Carl Icahn. We dig into what a 2.0 deal would actually look like, why existing bondholders could get layered all over again, and how the Vici REIT spinoff reshaped the entire capital structure in ways most headlines completely miss when they quote the "$7 billion" offer price.

But the bigger story is what's happening across private credit broadly. In the last few weeks alone, Blue Owl permanently gated a perpetual fund, Blackstone partners had to backstop redemptions, and BlackRock, Cliffwater, and Apollo have all gated funds. We push Sujeet on the question every allocator is wrestling with: is this a contained correction or the early innings of something systemic? We get into why first-lien recoveries have collapsed, why loan-only capital structures and uni-tranche debt have changed what "senior secured" actually means, the PIK toggle canary that's quietly ticking up, and why the alt managers trading at 40x forward earnings may have priced in a growth story that's about to meet its first real credit cycle.

We also cover the fascinating bifurcation playing out in real time — record investment-grade issuance from Amazon, Honeywell, and others on one end, while BDCs gate retail investors on the other — and what it means for the push to get private credit into 401(k)s. Plus: the $80 million Wachtell-to-Kirkland lawyer poaching that Sujeet wrote about and why it might be the most underrated leading indicator of the next debt crisis.

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