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You’re doing that thing again where you imply there is no middle ground between a few shares and a billion dollars worth of shares. It’s a dumb straw man. Elon

You’re doing that thing again where you imply there is no middle ground between a few shares and a billion dollars worth of shares. It’s a dumb straw man. Elon musk saying he would sell his shares because he was backing out of an agreement to purchase those shares at an inflated price is obviously going to drop the price. This is not the same thing as a random shareholder who happens to own stocks and wants to divest some. If you want to sell all your shares for X, you’d be an idiot for not selling some of them for more than X. This is not difficult to understand. Acquisition offers for less than market value are extremely rare, absent non public information. They are called takeunders. They generally only happen when a company is on deaths door. Which lyft is not. It would be seen as really dumb to offer less than market value in an acquisition bid. Stop making up rhetoric as if this were a normal reasonable thing to do. It’s not.

wpietri 3y ago
Somebody who owns a large percentage of a company is not "a random shareholder". Your simple-minded models work for random shareholders, but not for people who own significant fractions. They're playing a different game. They can't exit without moving the market. Their actions are tracked by other players, who will treat it as material information. Liquidity is not some magic reservoir; it's composed of individuals with fixed sums of money making trading decisions. I will take your continued inability to name anybody who would buy a major stake in Lyft at market price as an admission that you agree there's nobody like that. Since you claim to be concerned about straw men, I'll point out that I never suggested "this were a normal reasonable thing to do". You asked why somebody might take an offer that didn't have a premium, one that "won’t be higher than the current stock price". I explained why Lyft's current shareholders might do that. That's all.

wpietri 3y ago

Somebody who owns a large percentage of a company is not "a random shareholder". Your simple-minded models work for random shareholders, but not for people who own significant fractions. They're playing a different game. They can't exit without moving the market. Their actions are tracked by other players, who will treat it as material information. Liquidity is not some magic reservoir; it's composed of individuals with fixed sums of money making trading decisions. I will take your continued inability to name anybody who would buy a major stake in Lyft at market price as an admission that you agree there's nobody like that. Since you claim to be concerned about straw men, I'll point out that I never suggested "this were a normal reasonable thing to do". You asked why somebody might take an offer that didn't have a premium, one that "won’t be higher than the current stock price". I explained why Lyft's current shareholders might do that. That's all.