Giovanni Arrighi wrote an entire book on why buyouts (and other financial manuevers) are favored over investment in real assets. Edward Wolf's review in NLR(defensively argued over by Arrighi) fills in some gaps.
Roe repeats the myth of discounted future value, but the reality is no one has a clue regarding the true future value of investments in fixed capital, although there is, of course, lots of wishful thinking about poorly understood technology.
Everyone seems to forget that by historical standards new product innovation for the consumer markets sucks in the United States. Arguably, and Bill Lazonick makes this argument, claiming that the era of corporate "managerialism" had a far better record: organizations could nurture innovation for decades, if necessary, before seeing a profit. TV and RCA is an example. I suggest other reasons, declining wages and the lack of expected future income growth makes trying a brand new product idea more risky. Interestingly, the one innovative area I can name, medical technology, is the most socialized, the costs are borne by insurance companies and gov't R&D and transfer payments. As for electronics, what precisely is conceptually new? That's probably why when Amazon loses money putting a book catalogue on a tv set, the financial "analysts" go crazy. And the IPO crowd takes a flyer on anything with the word Internet in it.