Word has it Marc Raibert is not the easiest person to work with as an acquiring company, in a sense that he will keep control of the company, and do whatever he wants with it.
Good for him, I think.
Good for him, I think.
And generally, it got passed around because there is valuable research IP that belongs to the company, which given the right market can be valuable, so in the spirit of capitalizing on it if that market realizes, companies either jump on it, or preemptively buy it for a later sale (which is no doubt what Softbank did)
The main point is that profitability is probably not the issue why BD is switching owners so often. Some of these owners did not need the cashflow from the sale in the first place.
since softbank though, marc has transitioned to a chairman role, and the company has put in a lot of work into commercialization. i suspect they are still mostly R&D focused, but they are focusing more on commercialization than they ever have before in their history.