Originally Posted by
Regularguy
The real question you all should be asking is, why do these guys want control of the board?
The stock price by itself is rather limited so that can't be the real thing they want to affect.
My list of possible scenarios are:
1. They want to force a cash settlement to go away.
2. They could actually sell off parts of the route system for cash.
3. They just love the fight.
In it all I think we can all agree they really don't want to run an airline.
They can do a LOT of hijinx with control of the BoD, especially if they have the Chairman position.
They could sell off aircraft (sale/leaseback), routes, gates, slots for top dollar in the current market.
They could lever up the balance sheet and do a huge special dividend. Then sell off their stock holdings and leave United a heavily indebted shell of a company.
There are plenty of different ways that they can extract a ton of cash from United, many of which we wouldn't think of.
The bottom line is that they're not going to do the company any long term favors with their meddling.