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If looking at percentage of the whole, there are a lot of companies tied for the "win" at ~100%.



Oh there's plenty of companies that have lost more than 100% of their value. If you go from a positive value to a negative value (e.g. you have outstanding liabilities that cannot be discharged), that's a >100% reduction in value.

One good example would be old mining companies that went bankrupt. Their value cratered to zero, AND now the corporate overlords that ended up acquiring them are spending neverending millions of dollars spent to clean up Superfund sites decade after decade. There are some liabilities that simply cannot be discharged.


Why did anyone acquire them then?


Because people make mistakes, the true value of a company is often not known anyway, etc.

You may as well ask why someone buys a stock that then goes down. You didn't think it would go down when you bought it, obviously, but you were wrong.




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