Matt Levine, Columnist

Shareholders, Analysts and Regulators

Also TeslaCity, correlations, 1MDB, housing markets, unicorns etc.

September 6, 2016 at 1:16 PM UTC

Matt Levine is a Bloomberg Opinion columnist. A former investment banker at Goldman Sachs, he was a mergers and acquisitions lawyer at Wachtell, Lipton, Rosen & Katz; a clerk for the U.S. Court of Appeals for the 3rd Circuit; and an editor of Dealbreaker.

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Airgas.

Oh man, there are a lot of timely themes in this Airgas story about how founder-executives should be allowed to ignore their shareholders and run their companies as personal fiefdoms. Airgas was built up by Peter McCausland. In 2010, Air Products made a hostile $5 billion offer to buy it. Airgas shareholders wanted to sell, and McCausland lost a proxy fight, but with the help of a poison pill and an important Delaware Supreme Court decision, he nonetheless was able to fend off Air Products and keep Airgas independent. But then Air Products started circling again, and so this year Airgas ended up selling to Air Liquide, for more than twice what Air Products had offered in 2010. McCausland now raises weird cows on his farm.