“We believed that the new owners would carry our vision forward and continue to build great bikes, employ great people, and deliver on the promise of quality, fun and a little weirdness that had defined Kona for so long,” […]

Maybe they were naïve to what private equity is really about; maybe the payout made them blind to it.

Quoting myself:

Private Equity colludes with the private banks (which control the Federal Reserve and have largely captured the Treasury) to acquire companies using almost no initial capital. They then strip those companies of as much value as they can and then sell the depleted companies to lower-rung PEs, which squeeze out what little value is left, and so on until the companies default from the highly-leveraged debt PE saddles them with. These are asset stripping schemes.