Oh, yeah I might have. It was JP Morgan who did SDV, wasn't it?...

Oh, yeah I might have. It was JP Morgan who did SDV, wasn't it? - well they didn't get paid yet as I recall. But that doesn't change the implication that they are about to do something that needs merchant banker services. There are only so many things that can be, perhaps it is the A40 placement as @James56 suggested, or perhaps it is a partnership deal, or perhaps it is the share buyback set up or perhaps they are talking through their hats. Or (assuming MS were actually shorting rather than just writing stupid reports or acting as the broker for shorters ) perhaps holding out that you are going to engage one of the enemy as a client is a brilliant strategic move to stop them from actively destroying your SP.

The objective in business, as you know, is to win, hopefully without making anybody else actually lose, but win regardless. If doing good is your mantra, then if you don't win first you aren't going to be there to do any good anyway. While it may be distasteful, engaging the kid on the block with the biggest machete gun to work on your team and point the darn thing at someone else is better than waving your arse at him while he and a dozen of his mates keep firing machetes at you. Totally lacking in ideology or principles, I accept, but if you are being hacked to death from multiple directions it is expedient to try and bring some of the hackers on to your side. So perhaps it is a piece of brilliance and perhaps it is one of the reasons why we seem to have a hell of a lot fewer machetes to deal with at the moment than we did just a month or two ago..

Clearly logic and appealing to their common sense about the true company worth wasn't working, so maybe just waving money at them will be enough to bring them to heel. Money is, after all, all that truly interests them, and there is no way of taking them out of the fight by going to war with them, certainly not in the present market atmosphere.

We often had to work with governments whose political ideology I despised. We would tell them how to do what the wanted to do, and then tell the next lot how to undo what we had told the previous lot how to do. If we had played favorites we would not have been in business more than one term of government, and even then within a government with whom we actually agreed, there was rarely more than a fraction of even their ideas that we would have chosen to do for ourselves. At least by working with "the enemy" we were able to contain some of their truly stupid and destructive desires. My point is that sometimes your are better off keeping the bad guy contained in your team than letting him roam free to do whatever ill he can dream up.

I would also prefer to use none of these people, but that is not being ruthless, that is being emotional. I would use them and shower off the slime at the end of the day. Revenge is a pie best eaten cold. Better to cool the pie then.