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Shareholders are discriminated against all the time; companies have "preferred" and "common" shareholders. Meanwhile: nobody is actually discriminated against, because it's economically irrational to buy more than the shareholder rights plan trigger; from some light reading, it looks like no poison pill has ever been triggered (the whole point of the poison pill plan is to prevent that from happening).

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As far as I know, the only instance of a poison pill being triggered was Versata Enterprises, Inc. in December 2008.

TL;DR: A competitor (Selectica, Inc.)--wishing to purchase Versata--bought over 5% of the shares. The IRS considers this an ownership change, and it imposes a penalty to discourage trading of Net Operating Loss (NOL) carryovers. A poison pill was in place to prevent this tax issue. The board executed the poison pill to dilute Selectica ownership from 6.4% to 3.9%, and that action held up through appeal to the Delaware Supreme Court.

https://www.lw.com/upload/pubcontent/_pdf/pub2563_1.pdf

Do you mean held up or upheld?

the action held up; the court upheld it.

Quite an interesting bit of corporate governance history. Thanks for sharing.

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