R.J. Reynolds taken private by the 'Texas Rangers' (1979)
In one of the first modern take-privates, a group of investors led by the heirs of the Reynolds family, backed by Michael Milken's Drexel Burnham Lambert, bought the tobacco company out of the public markets. The deal was financed with a heavy load of new debt, which is exactly what made it controversial and exactly what made it a template. It showed that a public company could be bought back by its own people plus outside capital, and run privately.
Why it mattered
R.J. Reynolds proved that the leveraged take-private was a workable structure, not a theory. It taught a generation of bankers and sponsors how to blend debt with equity to buy an established business, and it set the stage for the leveraged-buyout boom of the 1980s. Every big take-private since has borrowed, in one way or another, from the structure worked out here.