United is owned by the Glazer family, the American venture capitalists who knew virtually nothing about football outside of their love of the Tampa Bay Buccaneers, who bought the English club in an unpopular leveraged buy out.

CNN: City beat United in battle of Manchester

TDC, a Danish telecoms company acquired last year in Europe's largest leveraged buy-out so far.

ECONOMIST: Credit derivatives

Strictly speaking then, these legendary companies are no longer really technology firms anymore, but rather giant leveraged buy-out companies.

FORBES: Software PACMAN

Instead, Yale's largest equity investments are in private venture-capital and leveraged buy-out partnerships.

ECONOMIST: Investment strategies

The leveraged buy-out approach may already be fizzling because the generous debt terms that it relied on are no longer available.

ECONOMIST: Inbound and outbound deals

It said Saunders planned a leveraged buy-out of the sport in a scheme that would eventually see the teams owning the franchise.

BBC: Ecclestone is trying to secure the future of F1 beyond 2007

Smaller firms that had followed the leveraged buy-out path got whacked, too.

ECONOMIST: Inbound and outbound deals

But that was long before Hanes began moving much of its production offshore, and before the Tobacco Master Settlement Agreement (under which the tobacco companies agreed in 1998 to pay hundreds of billions of dollars in damages for harming people's health), the leveraged buy-out of RJR by a private-equity firm, the elimination of federal farm price support for tobacco and decades of anti-smoking advertising.

ECONOMIST: North Carolina builds on the legacy of the golden leaf

Gucci-shod leveraged-buy-out kings may appear to be more sophisticated than the waitresses buying dotcom shares a decade ago but many of the newcomers are no more knowledgeable about technology.

ECONOMIST: Silicon Valley and the technology industry