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Orchestrated by many of the deal wizards who led Pfizer’s bidding for AstraZenica, AbbVie has gained verbal confirmation from Shire to move forward on the largest non-U.S. drug merger of the year. After five sequential bids, AbbVie’s $53.7 billion offer for the Dublin-based company was OK-ed Monday by the board. Led by Chief Executive Rick Gonzalez, the Chicago-based drugmaker will take the reins as long as they can provide the deal logistics at the set price.

$ABBV accretive deal. hep c soon to be on the market. $70 stock.

— Swingman24 (@Swingman24) Jul. 14 at 01:51 PM

Offering a 50.5 percent premium to Shire’s market price before takeover speculation erupted four weeks ago, the deal is now only an 12 percent premium to Shire’s closing price on Tuesday. AbbVie proposes to pay $44.71 in cash per share, and swap each of the remaining Shire share with 0.896 of an AbbVie share.

$ABBV getting destroyed. Overpaying for $shpg. $53 billion is way too much. Max pain coming

— Ari Gold (@AriGold) Jul. 14 at 08:54 AM

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$ABBV overpaying for $SHPG. This will not end good for Abbvie as debt load is simply astronomical on future revenues.

— Ari Gold (@AriGold) Jul. 14 at 09:11 AM

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It is hard to believe the company isn’t overpaying for the freedom to move its tax domicile, but as an analyst from British banking group Berenberg commented, “The company has to be of a certain size, because around 20 percent of the shareholders post-deal must be shareholders in the target company.” This ruled out quite a few of the options AbbVie could have been considering, and with quite a few companies already snapped up in the first half of the year, Shire looked like an increasingly eventual endgame.

On the value front, according to an analyst from Bank of America Merrill Lynch, pending completion, the deal will create $38 dollars per share in additional value to a combined company, which suggests AbbVie will be keeping upwards of 20 percent of that deal value to itself, discounting the purchase price significantly, and staying a lot of the complaining over the hefty premium.

Vinod Khosla has interesting ideas, one of them was to buy Google for $300,000 bucks. Unfortunately, bureaucracy would have it, Khosla couldn't authorize the deal with his boss' back in the day. 

In the interview with Sergey Brin and Larry Page, a lot of what Vinod says is overlooked, as many are salivating to hear the next tech prophecy from Larry & Serg, but the old timer, who founded Khosla Ventures, has some snippets of value here and there that tell us about a few problems companies he's worked with have. Just a couple quotes I've highlighted below. 

"It is amazing when the business people take over [a company], how quickly they get in attempting to create revenue and lose the overall vision."

Often more than not, applying business solutions people to a conceptual vision, is like using fork to play a fiddle. 

"I fundamentally believe that you move from an economy of labor and capital, to an economy of ideas, and most economists haven’t caught onto this change. Ideas are a disproportionately large part of the growth of the economy."

Would be interesting to get Vinod's idea of where various countries are in their cycle, compared to various companies, i.e. IBM, Tesla, India, and Russia. 

"Some people are good at starting things, not finishing things."

Simple, obvious, but not lacking in value. Such an important point to make in defining the success of a company.