They bought the maker of the device that opens when your child comes home from school, and now they have sent a hundred and sixty engineers inside the building to mine every last dollar from a thing they never built. They call it operating value. This is what your movement now means by the free market. As Mark Maurer reported in the Wall Street Journal this past week, Blackstone, Hellman & Friedman, and the AI company Anthropic have formed a $1.5 billion joint venture called Ode — a roughly 160-person team being deployed inside portfolio companies, beginning with the businesses Wall Street already owns, with Apollo, General Atlantic, and Goldman Sachs also in on the bet. The pitch is senior engineering, not cost-cutting. The plan is to extend the service well beyond PE-owned businesses on the strength of one quiet premise: that the expertise a business needs to run itself is, increasingly, expertise capital will rent back to it — part of the record capital flow Wall Street is now pouring into the AI build-out across equity and debt, the same firms already splitting teams between Anthropic and OpenAI ahead of the next listings.
Give them the honest version. Rodney Zemmel, who runs Blackstone’s operating team, makes a point of saying these are not kids. They are senior people. Chamberlain, which Blackstone took private in 2021 at roughly a five-billion-dollar valuation financed almost entirely with borrowed money, says its “digital doorman” business will go from forty million dollars last year to a hundred million this year and five hundred million by 2030. Before Ode arrived, the company’s own estimate was that the business would top out near a hundred and sixty million. An accounting firm whose portal lets a junior tax associate stop fighting copy-paste is also using the service. AI is a real technological shift. The executives insist cost-savings are not the primary goal. The steelman is real, and I am not going to pretend it isn’t.
But here is the part the press release leaves out. Chamberlain once had its own engineering team, its own product roadmap, its own idea of what a garage-door opener should become in a connected world. Now the most consequential technical decisions sit with engineers who work for Ode, who work for Blackstone, who work for a fund that will eventually sell the company to whoever pays the highest price. Chamberlain pays Ode through what the deal is styled as a “commercial consulting or service agreement.” It is the same fund, on both sides of the invoice. There is no arm’s-length when the same partnership owns the equity and signs the consulting agreement. The expertise is rented. The roadmap travels with the rentier. The Chamberlain that emerges in five years is not the Chamberlain Jeff Meredith would have built on his own. It is the Chamberlain the operating partners can exit at the maximum multiple.
Consider the celebrated fact. Chamberlain’s Prime Day advertising campaign in June cost “ten times cheaper” than a year earlier, per Zemmel. Ten times. Someone made that campaign before. Those people are no longer making it. That is what the word cheaper does not say. And one in five CEOs still expect AI to bring significant job cuts in their own workforce, down from nearly half in January — the executives who “dialed back” their layoff warnings did so because the market flinched, not because the layoff plans changed. OpenAI is building a rival shop with TPG for four billion dollars. The two giants will end up bidding for the same engagements. The fees go up. The autonomy inside the building goes down. The dispersed ownership that once made a Chamberlain or a Citrin Cooperman a participant in its own future becomes a customer of its own financier.
I watched the same mechanism from the other side of a trading screen. In the pit on LaSalle Street I watched a thousand variations of it: the parent company charges the subsidiary for management fees, for treasury services, for “consulting,” and the subsidiary’s accountants bless it because they were hired by the same hand that hired them. The cash moves up the chain and the leverage moves down. The engineer embedded in your building answers to someone who has never set foot there. I have signed the papers at our co-op in Friendship opposite the same faces. They have nice shoes. They have never loaded a truck.
In Adams County we have watched this verse play out for two generations. The family dairy gave way to corporate irrigated potato-and-vegetable monoculture — fewer and vastly larger operations growing for the snack-food giants on center-pivot ground where families used to make a living. The railroad shed our division point when dieselization came, and the Union Pacific takeover in 1995 finished the work. The regional paper mills collapsed one by one — Port Edwards in 2008, Whiting in 2010, the Verso mill at Wisconsin Rapids idled in the summer of 2020 — and the same capital that walked away sent in its consultants, its restructuring advisers, its PE-led buyout teams, to extract from the wreckage what the wrecking ball had left. What came instead was the amenity economy: the lake subdivisions on Castle Rock and Petenwell, the Sand Valley golf resort, the second homes that now make up nearly half the county’s housing. Some of it brought real jobs. None of it gave the county its own expertise back. The county did not become the engineer of its own future. It became the backdrop for other people’s — an address, not a place.
The conservative tradition once called this what it is. Russell Kirk warned that corporate consolidation turned independent enterprise into administered units. Robert Nisbet warned that when mediating institutions weaken, the centralized state grows to fill the void. The populist tradition — Jackson and the Bank War, the 1890s People’s Party — declared concentrated finance incompatible with liberty. G. K. Chesterton said the trouble was not too much capitalism but too few capitalists. A generation of conservatives could read those names and recognize the smell of what Ode is doing. The “senior engineering team” is the velvet glove. The iron hand is that a firm which once owned its own mind now rents the mind back from the people who own the firm. The earth was given for all. A garage-door company that pays its engineers in Adams County and keeps the roadmap in Oak Brook is not a place. It is a tenant.
What would have answered this, the cooperative tradition answered a hundred and fifty years ago, and the rural electric co-ops answered again under the Rural Electrification Act of 1936, and the credit unions answered every time a community decided that the people who use the service should also own the service. Adams-Columbia Electric Cooperative, headquartered here in Friendship, proves it on a working scale — thirty-one thousand five hundred and sixty member-owners across twelve counties, governed by a board its members elect, no engineers embedded from outside. The remedy is what we already know works: the people who do the work should own the tools that do the work. It is not more regulation written by people who have never run a thing. The Rochdale Pioneers proved it in 1844, before there was a joint-stock company worth suing: they pooled their tallow candles and opened a shop of their own rather than wait for somebody else’s consultant. The counter-model centralizes nothing. It answers to the place.
If Chamberlain were owned by its workers — engineers on the board, the roadmap voted up by the people who would build it — Ode would have nowhere to embed. The same is true of every accounting firm and garage-door maker in the country that has lately discovered it would rather be a portfolio company than a place. AI is not, by itself, the enemy. The technology is indifferent. The ownership is the whole question. Until the people who do the work also own the tools that do the work — and the data those tools are trained on — the new economy will be the old extractive economy with a fresh coat of paint and a hundred and sixty engineers inside it. There is no version of conservatism that defends borrowed money calling the tune inside the building it bought.
A market made up of many owners is what our tradition once meant by the free market. What we have now is a market made up of one.