It appears that some private equity banker bros talked Instant Pot into a $450 Million Dollar loan in 2021 and then paid themselves $245 million of it.
Private Equity. Instant Pot had great cashflow but slowing sales, so the PE owners issued $450M in new debt and then immediately paid out $250M in dividends to themselves resulting in the company carrying 8x leverage compared to the 4x it had prior to the financial engineering. Further slowing sales and all the cash being stripped from the company ends up with bankruptcy every time.
These are the same kind of people who bought Toys R Us, filled it with debt from other companies they owned made millions and then killed the company and left their employees high and dry.