Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: You Can’t Forget About a Merger (1)

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The way that public company mergers work is mostly that the executives of one company (the buyer) negotiate a deal with the executives of another company (the target), and then the board of directors of the buyer and the board of directors of the seller both approve the deal, and then the merger agreement is signed and the deal is publicly announced, and then the shareholders of the target get to vote on whether to take the deal. The shareholders of the buyer, though, usually don’t get to vote. The target is going to disappear, and its shareholders will ...