I understand why Six flags wanted to make this deal and why cedar fair didn’t. But honestly, neither are in a good position.
Both of them have basically no cash. Six is $100m and cedar is a bit less than that. Six has 2.5b in debt and is a 4b market cap. Cedar is 2b in debt and about a 3.4b market cap (but would have sold at 4b @ $70/share). Although that $70 wouldn’t hold as it’s an almost all stock deal, so they’d ultimately sell for significantly less.
If cedar sold, then Six flags is sitting on about a 7b market cap and 6b in debt with no cash. Talk about a house of cards.
But as I started with, they’re both houses of cards as it is. So at least a merger/acquisition they could have streamlined more and done redundancy layoffs and hoped for the best.
Cedar fair won’t ever get offered $70/share again and it was way overvalued. Then again, it was still a bad deal.