Who receives the money when one company buys another?
Shareholders of Monsanto  will get the money from Bayer. Shareholders are independent people or entities. Think of Monsanto  as a thing that shareholders had. This thing is now being purchased by Bayer Monsanto is a publicly traded company that trades under the ticker MON. The stock is owned by a wide range of owner around the world. The buyout offer from Bayer is an all cash offer. Bayer will buy all shares of MON at about $128/share. So if I owned 100 shares of MON, I would receive $12,800 or so for my shares. The deal has not yet been approved by regulators, which is why the stock price is hovering around $104/share today. It's tempting to think of a corporation as a real thing, because in many respects it seems to be. But it isn't a corporeal thing (despite the root word of the name). It may own corporeal things, and employ corporeal people, but it is not itself a real thing. Borrowing heavily from Prof Joseph Heath: It might be better to think of a corporation as the nexus of four separate entities: investors who provide capital, employees who do the work, suppliers who provide raw material, etc., and customers who purchase the products or services the corporation buys. In different organizations the 'owners' are different: in co-ops it's the suppliers, mutual insurance companies the customers, in employee-owned companies the employees, but in 90% of cases (including Monsanto) it's the investors. The investors who provided capital by buying shares of stock are the owners, and will be compensated. This frequently happens indirectly: You may own Monsanto stock through a mutual fund or other such aggregate which means that your mutual fund will get the money. Whether that winds up being a profit or loss is more complicated.
"Not at all impossible. What you need is Fundamental Analysis and Relationship with your investment. If you are just buying shares - not sure you can have those. I will provide examples from my personal experience:  My mother has barely high school education. When she saw house and land prices in Bulgaria, she thought it's impossibly cheap. We lived on rent in Israel, our horrible apartment was worth $1M and it was horrible. We could never imagine buying it because we were middle class at best. My mother insisted that we all sell whatever we have and buy land and houses in Bulgaria. One house, for example, went from $20k to EUR150k between 2001 and 2007. But we knew Bulgaria, we knew how to buy, we knew lawyers, we knew builders.  The company I currently work for. When I joined, share prices were around 240 (2006). They are now (2015) at 1500. I didn't buy because I was repaying mortgage (at 5%). I am very sorry I didn't. Everybody knew 240 is not a real share price for our company - an established (+30 years) software company with piles of cash. We were not a hot startup, outsiders didn't invest. Many developers and finance people WHO WORK IN THE COMPANY made a fortune. Again: relationship, knowledge!  I bought a house in the UK in 2012 - everyone knew house prices were about to go up. I was lucky I had a friend who was a surveyor, he told me: ""buy now or lose money"". I bought a little house for 200k, it is now worth 260k. Not double, but pretty good money!  My point is: take your investment personally. Don't just dump money into something. Once you are an insider, your risk will be almost mitigated and you could buy where you see an opportunity and sell when you feel you are near the maximal real worth of your investment. It's not hard to analyse, it's hard to make a commitment." SurePay is not designed to send money from one person to himself.  It is designed to transfer money from one person to someone else. What SurePay does, is allow you to link an account to a name/email/phone number.  Then, when someone else, who's also linked an account to a name/email/phone number, selects your name/email/phone number to send money to, the money is transferred.  This doesn't buy you anything when transferring money to another of your own accounts.  I won't say it's impossible to use SurePay to do so, but it's definitely not designed to do so, and may not be permitted.   If you could use it for that purpose, you would have to separately register your two accounts, using a separate email for each, and then use the first email to send to the second email; each will have been tied to a different account, so you'll know which is which. My suggestion would be to follow Wells Fargo's instructions here: Can I transfer funds to or from my accounts at another institution? You can transfer money between your Wells Fargo checking and savings accounts and accounts you may have at other U.S. financial institutions. Wells Fargo gives you greater flexibility, convenience, and control to transfer funds where and when you need it. Sign on to Wells Fargo Online and click the Transfers tab to learn more about transferring funds to your account at another financial institution. As that should give you the official answer, at least. "No, the stock market is not there for speculation on corporate memorabilia.  At its base, it is there for investing in a business, the point of the investment being, of course, to make money.  A (successful) business earns money, and that makes it valuable to its owners since that money can be distributed to them.  Shares of stock are pieces of business ownership, and so are valuable.   If you knew that the business would have profit of $10,000,000 every year, and would distribute that to the owners of each of its 10,000,000 shares each year, you would know to that each share would receive $1 each year.  How much would such a share be worth to you?  If you could instead put money in a bank and get 5% a year back, to get $1 a year back you would have to put $20 into the bank.  So maybe that share of stock is worth about $20 to you.  If somebody offers to sell you such a share for $18, you might buy it; for $23, maybe you pass up the offer. But business is uncertain, and how much profit the business will make is uncertain and will vary through time.  So how much is a share of a real business worth?  This is a much harder call, and people use many different ways to come up with how much they should pay for a share.  Some people probably just think something like ""Apple is a good company making money, I'll buy a share at whatever price it is being offered at right now.""  Others look at every number available, build models of the company and the economy and the risks, all to estimate what a share might be worth, more or less.  There is no indisputable value for a share of a successful business. So, what effect does a company's earnings have on the price of its stock?  You can only say that for some of the people who might buy or sell shares, higher earnings will, all other thing being equal, have them be willing to spend more to buy it or demand more when selling it.  But how much more is not quantifiable but depends on each person's approach to the problem.  Higher earnings would tend to raise the price of the stock.  Yet there are other factors, such as people who had expected even higher earnings, whose actions would tend to lower the price, and people who are OK with the earnings now, but suspect trouble for the business is appearing on the horizon, whose actions would also tend to lower the price. This is why people say that a stock's price is determined by supply and demand." "Why? Because they can get away with it, of course. In short - why not? You may want to read the answers to this similar question (my answer is the one accepted by the OP). Who has the money? The banks, who else. I have found that some banks are capable of sending/receiving ACH transfers faster than others. I have accounts in two banks, lets call them A and B. If I send money (push) from A to B, it may take several days. But if I decide to pull the money from A to B by originating the transaction through my account at B - the money arrives the next day! So the actual transfer only takes a night, one business day. Its just the direction that matters - if the bank has to give the money out, it will do all it can (including taking 2-3 days for ""processing"") to keep the money as long as possible. But when another bank charges them - they have no choice but to pay. By the way, bank B behaves better - when I send the money from my account at B, it arrives to A the next day as well. Try a similar experiment. Instead of originating the transaction at the sender bank - try to originate it at the receiver bank, see how long it takes then for the money to appear on your account after it disappeared from the other one." I found the following on a stock to mutual conversion for insurance firms for Ohio. Pulling from that link,  Any domestic stock life insurance corporation, incorporated under a general law, may become a mutual life insurance corporation, and to that end may carry out a plan for the acquisition of shares of its capital stock, provided such plan: (A) Has been adopted by a vote of a majority of the directors of such corporation; (B) Has been approved by a vote of stockholders representing a majority of the capital stock then outstanding at a meeting of stockholders called for the purpose; (C) Has been approved by a majority of the policyholders voting at a meeting of policyholders called for the purpose, each of whom is insured in a sum of at least one thousand dollars and whose insurance shall then be in force and shall have been in force for at least one year prior to such meeting.  and Any stockholder who has assented to the plan or who has been concluded by the vote of the assenting stockholders, and any stockholder who has objected and made demand in writing for the fair cash value of his shares subsequent to which an agreement has been reached fixing such fair cash value, but who fails to surrender his certificates for cancellation upon payment of the amount to which he is entitled, may be ordered to do so by a decree of the court of common pleas for the county in which the principal office of such corporation is located after notice and hearing in an action instituted by the corporation for that purpose, and such decree may provide that, upon the failure of the stockholder to surrender such certificates for cancellation, the decree shall stand in lieu of such surrender and cancellation.  Since they successfully became a mutual insurance company, I would guess that those stocks were acquired back by the company, and are leftover from the conversion. They would not represent an ownership in the company, but might have value to a collector. "That's a very clear explanation, thanks! So a few additional things if anyone will humor my curiosity...  1. By ""one-time"" tax, does that mean a company that has, say, $5B overseas could bring that back into the US and just be taxed $500M, then keep the remaining $4.5B?  2. Could a company choose a percentage of their overseas money to transfer into the US? Like, only bring in 8% of that $5B ($400M) and be taxed $40M, while keeping all the rest outside the US? Or would it be mandatory to bring it all over?  3. Would most companies just start that same practice of routing to tax havens again after this tax is implented?" For each class A share (GOOGL) there's a class C share (GOOG), hence the missing half in your calculation. The almost comes from the slightly higher market price of the class A shares (due to them having voting powers) over class C (which have no voting powers). There's also class B share which is owned by the founders (Larry, Sergei, Eric and perhaps some to Stanford University and others) and differs from class A by the voting power. These are not publicly traded. Shareholders provide their capital to the company via buying issued stock from said company. In a way they are owning the company through that transaction by a percentage. Ownership is now in question depending on how big the company is. Apple? You have a snowballs chance in Hell trying to assert your 'ownership' of your one share of their stock. So in theory yes they technically own part of the company but the decision making is up the board. Though the shareholders can voice their opinion and give up their vote via proxy voting. I'm a little rusty please correct me if you must.