> Companies don't have to put themselves in a position to be bought to have offers thrown at them. We're past the stage where offers have been thrown at them.

> Companies don't have to put themselves in a position to be bought to have offers thrown at them. We're past the stage where offers have been thrown at them. We're at the stage where wedding vows have started to be exchanged "pending regulatory approval". Companies do have to put a lot of work into those parts of the M&A stages (they've done multiple rounds of fit vetting and offer/contract approvals and investor handshakes, etc). At the waiting for regulatory approval stage they've already gone above and beyond any "fiduciary duty" they are expected to perform to already seeing the M&A as the "foregone conclusion". They've agreed to be bought and have put tons of work into being bought. A lot of companies don't come back from that when the regulatory agencies disapprove and shut the whole thing down. At the very least it is a morale blow for all the of the hard work of the M&A process up to that point and boards/investors often seem to become more certain that the next step is an exit, especially after the pain of a failed exit. > The rest of your response hinges of the fact that we don't know the unknown variables and therefore the decision is not simple. But this argument could be made for literally every decision in life and we would all be stuck doing nothing. We have to make decisions based on what we know and accept that there will be a margin of error. Ideally we also know all the risk factors but that's literally impossible. We aren't making any decisions here. Other than I guess picking sides in "anti-buyout" and "pro-buyout". I admitted I'm not feeling like my opinions weight to either side, I'm just pointing out the possible real world fallout of "anti-buyout". That's nothing to do with decisions at all. I am just pointing out all the unknowns because people are assuming that supporting "anti-buyout" means supporting the status quo and that's absolutely not the same thing.