Apollo just outbid Castlelake for EasyJet — £5.7 billion, 715 pence a share, take it or leave it by August 7. Bloomberg's headline: "EasyJet Receives Higher Apollo Offer, Drops Support for Castlelake Bid." Every number in that sentence is real. Every number in that sentence is also about money, not people. * Three days earlier, Bloomberg itself ran a completely different story: "EasyJet Pilots Nervous About Jobs, Leadership Under Castlelake." Real fear, on the record — pilots worried about who'd be running the cockpit under private equity, specifically spooked by a former EasyJet exec joining Castlelake's bidding group after leaving over a union pay fight. * Then Apollo topped the bid, Castlelake got dropped, and that whole conversation vanished — like a landlord selling your building to a different landlord, and everyone acting like that settles the eviction question on its own. * Here's what nobody in today's coverage points out: private equity is private equity, whichever logo's on the letterhead. Apollo isn't running a charity any more than Castlelake was. A £5.7 billion buyout doesn't pay for itself — the company being bought is usually the one who ends up footing that bill, and at an airline, the easiest line to trim is headcount, not aircraft. * Bloomberg will keep tracking this story by the pence-per-share. Just don't expect the roughly 17,000 people who actually fly and fuel these planes to get their own headline again until the deal's already done.