Welcome to Axis ProRata, a podcast that takes just 10 minutes to get you smarter on the collision of tech business and politics.

I'm Dan from Mack on today's show, self-driving car accidents and the latest in Trump versus Google.

But first, I don't want to grow up. I'm a Toys R Us kid. They got a million

toys or toys that I can play with. Two months ago, America's largest specialty toy retailer,

Toys R Us, closed its doors for good, eight months after first filing for bankruptcy. And for those

of you without kids or those with an Amazon fetish might not have been in a Toys R Us recently, it's worth realizing just the massive scope of this failure.

So there were around 1,700 toys and Babies R Us stores when the company went under, employing about 65,000 people.

To put that in context, that's more employees just at Toys R Us than there are American coal workers in total.

As for what happened, well, that depends a bit on who you ask. What we know is that Toys R Us

was bought in 2005 and a huge leverage buyout. And those private equity firms tried taking

it public a few years later, but that didn't work. And soon the company began struggling to

make debt payments related to the buyout. So for those

who don't know how private equity works, just in general, when private equity firms buy a company,

they do so with a lot of debt. And it's the company that holds that debt, not the private equity

firms. And the expectation is the company can pay off the interest or even pay off the debt by

continuing to grow. But in the case of Toys R Us, it soon hit big new competition

from companies like Amazon and Walmart. So by late last year, it couldn't handle the debt anymore

and a file for bankruptcy. With the expectation there would be a buyer for at least some of its

top performing stores. In fact, there were even offers. But by that point, the company was owned

by its creditors, not by the private equity

firms, and those creditors opted for a full-scale liquidation. So never bet against greed on Wall Street.

Since then, a workers advocacy group has been fighting to get severance for the workers,

...