You're right, they can do whatever they want. And they have been able to do so for several years now. So the best predictor of what they will do is look at what they have done and figure out what they want.
They have never done the sort of acquisition that Citi is positing here. Why is that? The most straightforward explanation is that they don't want to. And yet financial "analysts" constantly make up these Apple merger rumors... Netflix, Twitter, Tesla, Disney, Blackberry, TimeWarner, Yelp, Tidal, those are just once I came up with looking at a Bing search for "apple merger rumors." They never happen. Yet people still keep responding to them like they're not total bullshit.
People have to come to that realization on their own.
There's a new sucker born every minute, and the way you target those suckers has to adapt to regulations.
The way I realized it was when I went through ten year old yahoo finance message boards, and compared consensus arguments on stocks with what happened in those stocks. It was 100% uncorrelated.
Here's Apple's acquisitions:
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_mergers_and_acquisitio...
They have never done the sort of acquisition that Citi is positing here. Why is that? The most straightforward explanation is that they don't want to. And yet financial "analysts" constantly make up these Apple merger rumors... Netflix, Twitter, Tesla, Disney, Blackberry, TimeWarner, Yelp, Tidal, those are just once I came up with looking at a Bing search for "apple merger rumors." They never happen. Yet people still keep responding to them like they're not total bullshit.