The night before the same transaction, they issued a pile of diluting shares to themselves, effectively clawing back something like 50% of the rank and file employees’ stock options.
I might have the date and percentage wrong, but it doesn’t really matter.
Silver Lake are total bastards and probably belong in jail. Avoid.
How is it legal to say "you bought 50% of this, but now I've arbitrary decided that I own 99% of it because I gave myself more percent"
The company starts up, it has 100 shares, you get 50. If you calculate it, you own 50%.
Later on the company needs to raise cash, so it issues another 100 shares. Company now has a ton of cash in the bank. Total shares outstanding is 200. Now you own 25%.
In general companies typically raise money because they think the cash infusion will benefit the existing shareholders in the long run, either by not going into ≈bankruptcy or having the cash to do investments / move into new markets etc.
^W is a control code. This specific one represents the keys ctrl+w, a keyboard command in Vi and Bash among other things. It deletes the previous word. You often see something similar with ^H as well, which is a single-character backspace. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Backspace#^W_and_^U has some more information about these.
Some people use them more to make visual jokes in written text, more or less the same way you'd use strikethrough formatting in text.
…thsi typo^Ŵ^H^H…
start to appear, sometimes followed by several random letters hit in frustration, before the final hard-reset of the terminal and resignation to the fact some unsaved work has been lost.
Even then, there are no guarantees. A company can simply be mismanaged and overvalued as we saw recently with this Danish airline: https://apnews.com/article/scandinavian-airlines-air-francek...
Either way, if you had a majority of the voting shares, you could've stopped the issue.
Apple has been doing this aggressively for the past 10+ years.