Did you have your conclusion in mind before running your back of the envelope calculation? Many people do this much of the time. That often results in motivated

Did you have your conclusion in mind before running your back of the envelope calculation? Many people do this much of the time. That often results in motivated reasoning. One way to reduce that tendency is to use multiple POVs of analysis. You could phrase it as a question instead: what assumptions would you need to change for the valuation to make sense? Other questions: What factors are you not including? / What would it take for nepotism to survive scrutiny and how much nepotism would be tolerated? My guess here is there are long-term strategic factors that the decision makers weighed heavily. I’d be very interested in understanding their world view, since they have much better internal visibility of both companies.