Tribune Company (Bankruptcy)

Tribune's 2008 bankruptcy demonstrates how leveraged buyouts can kill healthy organisms by loading them with lethal debt. Sam Zell's $8.2 billion 2007 acquisition added $13 billion in debt to a company already struggling with newspaper decline. Like attaching a parasite that extracts fixed resources regardless of host health, the LBO debt burden proved fatal when advertising collapsed. The company that owned the Chicago Tribune and LA Times filed for bankruptcy one year after acquisition.