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Comment by rendang | Hacker News Reader

I saw a twitter commentator point out that this is higher than the $40B Nvidia wanted to buy it for. Argument was that stricter antitrust could actually lead to greater shareholder value.

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the IPO is only for a fraction of the company's shares

whereas the $40B would have been for 100% of them

The valuation includes the shares Softbank kept (~90%)

Current share price is only the price the last trade was made at. It would be remarkable if the other 90% could sell for anywhere near that number. Comparing an offer for the entire company to selling 10% to the public is a bit lopsided.

That is why they only sold 10%. They think they can keep market depth thin, raise the price, and sell more over time at higher prices when they need cash. This is exactly what Intel is doing with Mobileye. It’s a piggy bank that they will break open from time to time.

which is why it's meaningless to try to equate market cap with an unconditional instantaneous purchase of all outstanding shares

Generally if you want to buy the whole thing / take it private, you have to pay out all shareholders in cash the public market price plus a premium - you definitely don't get a discount.

Just look at what happened to Elon.

you don't know what the public market price is for the majority of the shares as only 10% were sold today

I don't know what that means - but when an individual or a company looks to buy out another company wholesale, they do in fact use the public market price, multiply it out by the full share cap, and then add a premium on top. That's literally how a buyout works.

> I don't know what that means

maybe we should stop here then

Your sentence didn't make sense - just look up how buyouts work and how they're priced.

That's literally not how buyouts work. The public stock price is certainly one factor of many that go into calculating the acquisition price, but it is not an absolute floor. One counter-example that comes to mind is Yahoo!, which was purchased by Verizon for less than its market cap at the time.

It’s not an absolute floor no, but it’s a strong factor in price determination. It feeds back the other way too, if a competitor is acquired for far less than public price it smacks the public price of competitors.

Assuming there is a buyer waiting to take ARM private seems pretty unlikely.

If you happen to hold the majority of shares and then try to sell them suddenly you’ll sell them at a discount. Just look at TSLA when Elon had to liquidate significantly to pay for TWTR.

> Assuming there is a buyer waiting to take ARM private seems pretty unlikely.

The whole premise of this comment thread is that ARM made more by selling 10% of its stock on a public market than they would have by selling 100% of it to Nvidia. In other words: there already was a buyer who wanted to take ARM private. So how does it seem unreasonable to assume one would exist, when we already know that one did?

Ok. Let’s play that out. Nvidia walks away from a negotiation at 40 and now they are waiting around to do a leveraged buyout at 70? Why?

They didn't walk away from it. They were blocked from making the acquisition.

market cap is same as 100% of shares so it is $25B more than Nvidia price

only if you assume there is the same level of instantaneous demand for a supply of 10x as many shares

definitely not the case

That is what you assume when you look to take a company private.

Think about it this way: The current market price represents the amount the shareholders who least value their shares would be willing to sell them for. As you want to acquire more, the price is going to go up, not down.

That's pretty irrelevant if it only represents 10% of the total equity, though. It's not like you, as a retail investor who owns a few shares of a company, have any say in whether it gets acquired.

SoftBank values continuing to hold the other 90% of the shares more than the market price or they’d be selling more.

Nvidia is worth over 3 times as much as it was at the start of the attempted acquisition.

Also keep in mind that Softbank was going to keep part of the company (IoT) in the Nvidia deal.

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