Saturday Night Special

It’s 1972, the Bee Gees are on the radio (it's a strong radio, and all of them together weigh only 400 pounds), and we’ve just had the grooviest idea ever: we want our company, Discobuild, Inc., to acquire Far Out Flooring, one of our suppliers.

A glance at the calendar tells us it’s Saturday, which means it’s the perfect day to put our plan into action. We’re going to issue a public announcement offering to buy shares of Far Out stock for $11 per share, which is a whole dollar higher than it’s trading on the market. Our hope is that enough shareholders will take us up on this offer before the big dogs over at Far Out figure out what’s happening. After all, since we’re rolling this out on a Saturday, there’s a pretty good chance people aren’t paying as much attention to things like these as they would during the week. Once we buy up enough shares, we can take over Far Out Flooring and make it part of the Discobuild empire.

This plan is what’s known as a “Saturday night special,” and the reason our example takes place in the ‘70s—other than the obvious opportunity to make disco references—is because Saturday night specials really haven’t been a thing since then. But back in the day, we could make a public tender announcement with a seven-day deadline, which means the acquisition target didn’t have a whole lot of time to organize their troops and stop the takeover. But when the minimum deadline was adjusted from seven days to 20, and then the SEC started demanding disclosure about certain kinds of mergers and acquisitions...it kind of took the wind out of the Saturday night special’s sales.

It’s a lot harder to pull off a sneaky acquisition when we have to disclose it to the SEC and stretch out the process over three weeks.