Name: Guitar Center Went Bankrupt. This Nuclear Engineer Is Bringing It Back.
Uploaded: 2026-09-23T18:00:00Z
Duration: 8 min 10 s
Description: Gabe Dalporto graduated from MIT with a masters in Nuclear Engineering. Now, he’s CEO of Guitar Center and has a plan to get the company out of debt.

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Gabe Dalporto graduated from MIT with a masters in Nuclear Engineering. Now, he’s CEO of Guitar Center and has a plan to get the company out of debt. Photo: Elizabeth Weinberg for WSJ

https://m.wsj.net/video/20260923/d8d398bf-ac98-47f0-a175-33ad6ab3716f/1/hls/manifest-hd-wifi.m3u8

Gabe Dalporto graduated from MIT with a masters in Nuclear Engineering. Now, he’s CEO of Guitar Center and has a plan to get the company out of debt.

Guitar Center Went Bankrupt. This Nuclear Engineer Is Bringing It Back.

That's Gabe Dalporto and since 2023, he's been the CEO of a remastered Guitar Center, taking over after nine consecutive quarters of revenue decline. What started as an organ and appliance shop in 1959, Guitar Center is no stranger to recomposing itself. As the British invasion hit the United States, the shop began investing in amplifiers and then guitars. It's Sunset Boulevard flagship store opened in the 1980s. That's still around today. But eventually, business slowed and online retailers like Sweetwater Sound took center stage. By 2017, Guitar Center had acquired more than $1 billion in debt, and in 2020, the company filed for bankruptcy. Now, Dalporto is in the process of reframing Guitar Center as a destination for higher end equipment and more experienced players. Guitar Center is currently in 10 consecutive quarters of growth, and Dalporto says his plan to continue growing stems not solely from his experience as a businessman, but as a musician.

So this is just clean, right? What if I want a little distortion?

Guitars under $5,000 stay on the floor, along with drum sets reaching into the tens of thousands. However, the exceptionally expensive instruments like this $18,000 Martin guitar stay locked in a case. Do I have to have credentials of some sort to ask for that to be taken out?

Just ask for it and, you know-

Okay.

Please don't steal it. Every morning, the team is turning these things on. They're making sure that they're operational, they're set up to speakers, you can play them, you can experience them. So our Guitar Centers are experience centers. Our goal is to have everything be experiential and just piece by piece we're making it easier.

You're CEO, you can sit down, you can know what all those pedals do immediately. Are you the first who can do that or the first in a long time?

Probably the first in a long time. I think the last six CEOs were not musicians. I think it's helpful, particularly in a passion category, to have someone who shares that passion and kind of understands empathetically what the customer's going through. When I see people playing, it gives me joy.

So I'm very curious to hear how you went from studying nuclear engineering at MIT-

Yeah.

To Guitar Center CEO today.

I got a degree in nuclear engineering. Only applied to two graduate schools, University of Florida and MIT. And I got into MIT. I'm just like, I cannot believe this, right? And so I have to go there.

Dalporto says his previous experience in nuclear science, marketing, and as a CFO helped him identify issues at Guitar Center that may have been overlooked in the past. What were the issues?

The company got taken private by private equity back in 2008 with too much debt, which kind of boxes you in. And then it had kind of a series of six, what I would say are probably very talented CEOs that weren't musicians and made a lot of one-off decisions that made a lot of independent business sense that laddered up to an experience that was very, very frustrating for our customers. All the guitars were locked, the best guitars were on the top row where you couldn't get to them. So if you wanted to play something, you'd have to ask an associate. They would have to get a ladder and go unlock it and bring it down to you. The keyboards weren't playable. The whole store was either locked down or just not set up to be experiential. Every one of these guitars back here feels different, sounds different. Even identical models, you pick them up, you go, "Oh wow, that's heavier." Or, "That one just has a little more resonance," right? And so the first thing they say is, I just have to be able to feel it and touch it and experience it. And so we turned over our inventory. Now it's like 75% premium, mid-tier, like the stuff that everybody really wants to play, 25% entry level because frankly, it's not that we don't want to serve beginners, but beginners literally do not need 200 beginner guitars.

And then is the other side of it, you just kind of have to change the reputation a bit?

The typical corporate approach was to say "Everything's great, we're awesome, everything is great, we're awesome." And we knew we were not being awesome to our customers and our customers knew we were not being awesome to our customers. The first thing I wanted to do was just to be honest with everybody and say, "Look, like Mea Culpa, we screwed up. We don't have the right product. We haven't been investing in our people. The stores are not in good condition. It's not easy to play. It's going to take us a little bit of time, but trust me, we're going to fix it." I think everybody started off super skeptical, but at least they felt the honesty and the desire. There's a lot of nuance in an instrument. If you're going to buy a PA system for your first gig or your first regional tour or something, these are big investments and it's complicated and super nuanced. Want a really, really knowledgeable basically musician in the store who can tell you what you should be focusing on.

Guitar Center plans to create something new themselves. They brought me to a workshop where Rich Thrush, the VP of Private Brands, is overseeing the development of a new in-house guitar. One they say is for serious musicians.

It is not uncommon to, you know, chop a guitar in half. And so this is just a rig where we just literally chop the neck off of a guitar.

How do you push guitar design forward?

The most common, highest selling guitars are almost identical to their forms when they were introduced in 1953 for the Tele, early 50s for the Les Paul. We have put a man on the moon. We've invented the personal computer. We have iPhones. And you're telling me the best we can do is 1953? I don't buy that.

So you're working on a very specific guitar right now, right?

We're going to, you know, be in that mid-tier price range, so it's not going to be super expensive, but it's going to be at a point where you can get an enormous amount of quality backed in there. And then when the serious musician picks it up, they're going to notice immediately like, the flexibility of this thing and the ease.

Guitar Center has also been crowdsourcing from the public on websites like Reddit and TikTok, asking the internet what they want in a new guitar.

So we really want to optimize this to make sure that we have a guitar that really is just rock solid. so when you're playing it, doesn't go out of tune. We're really trying to understand the science of what's going on with that structure and optimize it.

This is raising some eyebrows in the industry. What are other guitar manufacturers, your vendors saying?

They're pretty quiet about it. I think they're probably waiting to see and a little skeptical. Yeah.

I'm sure they make assumptions of where we're headed, especially since we've been doing so many things out in the open, but we haven't necessarily shown all the work that we've done.

Last year, there was a debt refinancing.

Yes.

You extended out to 2029. With that year set-

Yeah.

Where do you hope to see Guitar Center be in 2029, in the next three years?

My hope is that we continue to, we continue our 10 quarters of growth. I think the natural outcome for us is to be a public company, so I would like to see us find a way to be prepared for that. If I'm brutally honest, like I don't love private equity owning retail because I think they put so much debt on companies that it boxes retailers in and their ability to deliver great customer experiences. But we have a manageable debt load and we need to pay it down and we need to grow our business and our profitability so we can, you know, set ourselves up to have a good exit.