> The buyer shouldn't care if they are in place or not
Sure I do. Given a finite pot of money, I want 100% of it to go into incentive-based payouts. If the new company doesn't hit the goals, then I didn't lose so much money on the acquisition.
If the money pot went to feathering the nest of the investors and the acquisition doesn't work, then I've lost the entire pot.
> No, you buy them because you want to support good, non-nefarious companies with sound business models.
No, you really are buying the company stock because of current and future profit prospects. None of this supporting thing... a shareholder is just the owner of the share, nothing more.
> Ultimately, companies are not sold, they are bought.
What does that even mean? Companies are both sold and bought. One implies the other. There are always willing buyers for entities with non-negative value. Hell, I'm a willing buyer for Magic Leap, at the right price.
> The point of companies are to make money. As a shareholder in a company, I want to see increased valuations, good free cash flow metrics, and an increasing dividend.
There are companies that have other primary goals.
> The investor isn’t interested in what’s best for the CEO or company further than the extent to which that’s good for the investor.
Someone who owns shares in a company like this has multiple options. One option is to sell your shares and be done with it, assuming you think the problem is insurmountable. But if you remain invested, you can still do things that reduce the problem or things that exacerbate the problem. The last one seems particularly counterproductive.
> They were already a publicly traded corporation. Their interests have never been aligned with yours fundamentally, they've been aligned with a fiduciary duty to make profit for shareholders. Literally nothing about the profit motive has changed.
This is a trope that needs to stop. Public companies are not alike and the fiduciary duty is only a very high level one that can be used to justify both squeezing every customer as much as possible to losing money to support growth.
What the shareholders want matters and an acquisition changes that completely.
> Makes me sad that they’ll now have to increase profits forever
Providing a return to shareholders does not require increasing profits. Investing constant or declining profits into acquisitions or share buybacks can provide the same returns to shareholders.
> I'm not saying he'll do this, but theoretically he could just pay them out of pocket.
To be honest, I've never understood why we allow the purchased company to buy itself. It makes no logical sense and I've never heard a good argument as to why this is beneficial to our economy in general.
> You can sell your stocks to someone else. The company doesn't have to be the one to buy it.
But that defeats the purpose. The company buys back stock not to hold it, but to dissolve it and drive up the value of remaining shares mathematically.
> Since we haven't raised money and aren't planning on a
> big exit, I want to continue to pay myself well through
> distributions so that offers to buy the company continue
> to be easy to decline.
That's my favorite line from the post. People in the middle stages of building a long-term business have this tendency to think it's somehow wrong to take some portion of the profit for yourself - most believe it should be reinvested or redistributed.
This doesn't take into account that claiming a portion as yours is an investment - it's an investment to secure your own continued long-term interest in the project.
Clearly you wouldn't do it to the point where the company is suffering - but to the point where maybe you're just not growing as fast? Or have to do to add some features? Often a worthwhile tradeoff.
To collect its revenue.
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