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What if I don't want to sell my shares for $13.65 but hang on to them? Can Silver Lake just set a $13.65 value and force me to sell at that value to them?!

(Assuming I had shares, which I don't.)

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Yes, pretty much. The company is going private, and though the board and shareholders have to approve the sale, they can do so without your explicit approval, of course, just a majority (hence the bump in valuation of 25%). So those shares are no good after the deal closes, because the public company you have shares in just ceased to exist as a public company. Your return on investment is the per-share purchase price times the number of shares you hold.

This is the same thing that would happen in an all-stock transaction: let's say you own shares in Ford, and General Motors announces a buyout of Ford. The end-result is that you now own some percentage of GM, since Ford is now part of GM. Poof: your Ford shares convert to some equivalent number of GM shares. Do you cease to own Ford? Well, kind of, since Ford just ceased to exist. So there's nothing to "hold on to" in the sense you're implying.

Thanks!

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