Carlyle group et al buy a company, take out a huge loan against it, pay themselves a huge dividend, then use the procedes from an IPO to pay off the loan. Guess they couldn't just wait for the IPO to get paid like everyone else does. In a perfect market, the share price realized in the IPO would be discounted by an amount that compensates for the additional debt burden, and this could theoretically be a net neutral transaction. Except that money today is always worth more than money tomorrow.