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

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.