Karl Marx might’ve been talking about priests and poets, but damn if this doesn’t apply to investment bankers and private equity guys too:
“The bourgeoisie has stripped of its halo every occupation hitherto honoured and looked up to with reverent awe. It has converted the physician, the lawyer, the priest, the poet, the man of science, into its paid wage labourers.”
Once upon a time, banking and PE were the undisputed apex of wealth and prestige. Fat bonuses, insane carry, power lunches at Dorsia. Now? Slashed comp, shrinking carry, deal fees getting squeezed, and endless hours grinding for partners who keep more and more of the pie. Even buyside exits aren’t the golden ticket they used to be.
Finance used to be about building an empire. Now it’s just another high-paying job—one that’s losing its edge every year.
What’s next, MDs making €120k with “unlimited PTO”? PE partners doing TikToks about “quiet luxury”?
Marx called it. Bankers are not the bourgeoisie anymore. They are just expensive labourers.
I'm not sure PE partners doing TikToks about quiet luxury is that different from the average official corporate social media account these days.
sir this is a Wendy's
Stfu
Hur durr cue 1000th thread about the maturation of PE as an asset class and exact same 4-5 points made about narrowing risk / return spread
Yes. Correct we are all just employees. But show me the myriad other professions that require - and let’s be honest here - no real hard skills or specialized knowledge / training (at least initially) that can result in million $+ W-2 (ie no true downside risk) jobs
Finance does require hard skills. Modeling, understanding financials, understanding broad economic theory, these are all skills. You can't hire anyone to do these jobs.
Why shouldn’t it? PE is packed with people following the same cookie-cutter path—same unis, same IB stints, same technical prep. Why should a standard, oversaturated route be rewarded? Where’s the scarcity?
When KKR started, they were just 15 people—financiers (Kravis), lawyers (Kohl & Roberts), and a handful of executives with insane work ethic and creativity, exploiting financial weaknesses and tax/legal loopholes to execute billion-dollar deals. And they did it with, at most, 2-3 people working a single deal, planning different scenarios on billion-dollar companies. That was another level—THAT is what gets compensated. That’s what creates the "bourgeoisie" you talk about: entrepreneurship, work ethic, and aggressive opportunism.
If passing university tests, aligning PPTs for two years, and joining PE earns you a "Master of the Universe" title—or worse, if you expect a slice from the firm’s "bourgeoisie" (the partners) for doing that—then the title has lost all meaning and you have a flawed view about how capitalism works.
Restless if you were staring your career now what path would you take
Frankly, no idea. Times change so fast that I'm not even sure it makes sense to attach yourself to a specific career, hoping it follows over the next 10 years the same trajectory it had in the last 10.
Look at CompSci, for example. Everyone was convinced the future was in programming because of how much tech surrounds us. WSO was all about "tech > IB" in 21/22. Then OpenAI came and obliterated all career security for programmers. Now, programmers have the same tone as lawyers and IB ppl toward others: Don't do CompSci, it's done.
So, the same old adage—do whatever you like, or prioritize money in the early years and then shift to something you enjoy. There's no regret in doing what you like, as long as it also balances the career/compensation side. It's better to be an outlier in fishing because you have the passion for it than just another cog in the corporate machine.
You don't understand. PE / IB is his identity. And he doesn't identify as an worker bee, but an extra special 1% snowflake.
In all seriousness though, if OP and his ilk were capable of "empire-building", they wouldn't be in this industry.
That last part….that last part >
Generational wealth still comes from building something massive or leading something early on that scales. Look at the guys in PE who have built generational wealth: they are either PE firm founders or guys who joined early in one of those firms and absolutely executed. Nobody who joins a megafund today and doesn't move downmarket will ever make generational wealth. Ditto with IB; the guys with generational money are the ones who have a unique edge of some sort and most started much earlier than now as banking is far more of a mature industry now.
A Banking senior is one of the best low-risk, high-reward careers, relatively stable and lucrative, and compounding over time. PE partners take on more risk, as more of comp is tied to longer-term fund performance and carry, but with higher upside potential. The more ownership, the greater the risk—and the reward. Joining a young PE firm early with strong economics offers more upside, and starting your own firm is the ultimate wealth-building move, albeit with the highest risk At the core, both IB and PE offer elite financial security with substantial upside—the choice depends on your risk tolerance and how much you’re willing to bet on yourself.
Generational wealth? You’re killing yourself at work so your stupid, lazy grandkids can spend their lives skiing in Aspen and surfing in Malibu and otherwise doing nothing productive? Why?
Whose fault is it that your grandkids end up stupid and lazy? If scarcity is the only way to make your kids or grandkids not "stupid and lazy", that is admission of failings as a parent
Every skill set is trending towards democratization because of the increased availability of information and execution tools. PE and banking are not exempt from this trend. You are highly paid because of specialization. If more people can do a thing, it becomes less specialized, so comp will logically decrease.
You’re conflating finance with entrepreneurship. “Back in the day” PE was a gold mine because those guys started it and all had huge carry allocations. Now it’s a corporate job. Starting your own fund is still very lucrative if you can do it.
Some 2nd-3rd wave people got rich too without taking startup risk due to massive prolonged rising asset prices.
How rich is “rich”. I’ve seen PE partners at MFs / UMMs have $30m DaW but I feel like you can just clip that and be set for life which is why I’m shocked people don’t think PE is still worth it
I should not just call it a corporate job, it’s an extremely well paying corporate job and there is real money to be made at the top. People who retire as a partner without taking own fund or new fund risk probably have $10-50M lifetime earnings and that retirement usually comes in their 50s. It’s well worth it for the right person.
There’s a glass ceiling at most of these firms. Most people forget about this. At the huge funds, it’s a very low likelihood you’ll ever make partner. The partners are not retiring and people making $600K+ above you aren’t leaving because of how much they make. Alas-it’s harder to move up. To make insane wealth as an employee, you either need to be the lucky one to break the glass ceiling, or go to a small but growing fund and ride the wave up.
I'm sorry but you're a retard. No one is making you to work in pe or ib and with a starting salary of $110k, you are wealthier than 99% of human beings in the world. If you do not enjoy the life of a banker, I would recommend this alternative lifestyle that the cool kids nowadays call "living on a farm."
Marx might have been correct on few subjects (even a broken clock is correct twice a day) but he simply did not understand the concept of risk and reward, the impact of technological growth on society, Schumpeter's "Creative Destruction," social mobility in a capitalistic democracy, and many other things. His solutions were so preposterous that their implementation lead to millions of people dying in the twentieth century.
Marx didn't actually recommend any specific implementations, those were implemented by followers but his critiques/observations are largely correct. Certainly more than 2x a day, at least. Suggesting that one of the most forward thinking and influential people of the last 2 centuries didn't understand risk and reward is what is actuall retarded here.
More proof that Marx was right . . look how many in the audience get the PE joke. You used to have to explain to everyone what PE even means.
https://www.instagram.com/lucaszelnick/reel/DF4JRv8Jv_4/
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Feel like the quote makes an interesting point in this context but as others have pointed out the takeaway is misguided.
PE has matured and become commoditized just like other financial innovations before it. MF founders back in the 70s and 80s were rewarded for their role as innovators and pioneers. The creation of generational wealth requires taking on real risk which is increasingly more difficult to find in a PE career these days.
On the other hand, the Marx quote (and let’s not get it twisted dude had some wild takes) does hold some merit especially in the healthcare sector where patient care has become secondary to financial outcomes
Of course. Because they’re still wage laborers with no ownership. LPs are the bourgeoisie.
lol @ people in the top 0.1% of the world population complaining about getting "only" $300k instead of $500k
Great points about PE raised here, but specifically to your analogy, what’s the point exactly? “Every occupation honoured and looked up to, converted into its paid wage labourers.” Frankly, good? I mean the ostensible denigration of these fields more often that not comes down to democratization of their services. Nothing more, nothing less (and isn’t so bad a thing!).
Any of a physician, a lawyer, or other profession who possess developed skills are no longer viewed as some sort of deity for having possessed some amount of these skills (never mind the magnitude), but are instead an amalgam of their client outcomes. That’s what makes these jobs “wage slaves” in Marx’s view now - they’re responsible to parties that allow them to continue their work. Principally, their clients. Do you know the law? Maybe, maybe not. The only thing that I care about is whether you’ll win my case. Did you go to med school? Cure me of cancer and I don’t care either way.
Is the same thing happening in PE? Maybe, in a way. With the maturation of the industry comes a greater accountability to LPs and the broader market when alpha becomes increasingly difficult to generate in a saturated environment. Seems to me that, like these other jobs, the increasing “wage slave” nature of this role is just a function of the unwillingness of the clients to accept mediocrity, now that the outcomes have become clearer. If PE returns are converging toward market mean (and they are), the role at the junior level becomes a commodity. If the firm as a whole isn’t providing anything special, best of luck to the associate at the bottom of the ladder.
The point is, yeah man, you’re a wage labourer. Deal with it. You personally are not providing anything special, and especially young PE professionals can no longer and certainly shouldn’t pretend like there’s some kind of secret sauce that allows them to do what they do at the exclusion of anyone else with a modicum of intelligence. Get prestige out of your damn head. You ever do something differently from everyone else, it’ll be a topic worth revisiting. Until then.
Yeah because the golden age of PE would've happened under Marxism
How down bad are you at your job right now that you're reading the Manifesto
Comp is down? Compared to what, 2007 inflation-adjusted? Idk if that's even true.
Look at the end of the day you're like the 12th person on this forum to realize that wow, the industry is maturing and taking on the risk of ownership is going to earn you more financial upside than W-2's, even if the W-2's are pretty sweet, so it's harder to get on the ground floor of ownership now. Idk why that's some kind of Socratic breakthrough unless you believed in fairy tales you inhaled from Wall Street-adjacent movies growing up
lol
lol
We are not the capitalists. We are the capital.
lol we're not even the capital dude we're the capital's deployment managers.
Human capital is capital
Idk what these people are talking about you make high 6 figures in your early 30s in cash plus potentially 7 figure equity payouts yes you won’t be Henry Kravis but this is a huge gravy train…
Envy has destroyed their brain. One of the greatest tools of communists/socialists/neo-marxists is utilizing envy to replace rationality in convincing the herd to go against the market. You see this phenomenon on both the right (bannonites, populists, groypers, etc) and the left (basically all of left).
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