The morality tale about creditor-on-creditor violence, which has become all the rage on Wall Street, began innocently enough less than two years ago. In July 2024, a group of creditors at the cable company Altice USA, led by the affiliates of such debt powerhouses as Apollo, Ares, BlackRock, and Oaktree, joined together in a sort of co-op to prevent its owner, the reclusive French-Israeli-Moroccan billionaire Patrick Drahi, from playing them against one another. Drahi, of course, is legendary for pushing risk onto his creditors—Altice, now known as Optimum Holdings, has some $26 billion of debt—and is equally renowned for his ruthlessness and savvy. The Optimum co-op worried that Drahi would try to pull off a liability management exercise and pit one group of creditors against another to improve their standing in the capital structure, should the inevitable “absolute priority” rule get invoked in an ultimate bankruptcy.