

Fascinating twist on consolidation of ownership theory
There could be a cost benefit analysis that makes sense for the company if their goal is to go private via a buyout to initiate a buy back.
Current share price is let’s call it $2.50 for simplicity sake.
Outstanding shares - 3M if the off market buyer is aligned to ownership / take private. We don’t know how many aligned parties have gobbled up during the dilution event. Could be higher but for this exercise we’ll go with what we know.
Diluting to 40M shares gets the purchase price down to $132M if they are scooping up shares while diluting. They could feasibly raise an additional $20M in capital diluting along the way.
$132M - 60M would take the bid down to $72M as a true cost to the buyer.
Alternatively… what if they used the $40M in capital to buy back shares now at $2.5 per share. There are possibly only 3M shares to buy. If they got them all at $2.5, that’s only 7.5M and they walk away with the leftover cash. Obviously buying 75% of a stocks tradable shares is going to cause the price to grow quickly. But if they did so quietly, and over the next 7 weeks it could be a slow climb. Even if they only get to 75%, buying 2M shares with $40M in cash would be an average cost of $20 per share and they’d still acquire a huge portion of the company for a fraction of the true value price, leaving only 1M shares to take private via the buy out. If they offered $70 per share, it’s still cheaper than diluting, buying the shares aggressively and buying out the remaining 3M shares with cash.
Not convinced the buy out will happen. 1% chance. Total lottery play, which this stock always has been. But a fun thought exercise.
Still holding over here.