Yale professor Douglas W. Rae examines the 2007 TXU leveraged buyout, in which private equity firms KKR and TPG partnered with the Environmental Defense Fund to win approval for a major private equity deal. Rae structures the lecture around competing vantage points on the same transaction: Austin, where the electric utility's customer base and public opinion mattered most, Washington's K Street lobbying culture, and Wall Street's deal-making logic. He uses the case to show how a private company can ally with an environmental advocacy group to secure regulatory approval and public goodwill simultaneously, benefiting both sides. The discussion includes a period television ad about the deal and closes with Rae's framework of two competing worlds of strategic rationality operating on the same case. Part of the Yale course Capitalism: Success, Crisis and Reform, the lecture uses TXU as a worked example of how political and financial strategy intersect in a real corporate transaction.