It’s the same modus operandi as private equity but worse, because Broadcom has the money and technical resources to do interesting things with the technology, but they don’t.
still easy enough to target, and with the added benefit of non-stop internecine wikipedia arguments + the marketing depts of these firms edit pages + potential lawsuits
Broadcom is publicly listed with a public float of about 98% (i.e. 98% of it's shares are listed publicly).
You're right that most shares are held by institutions (~80%), but that typically reflects the fact that most share ownership by individuals/companies goes through intermediaries (401k, fund investments, ETF etc.). Most of this institutional ownership is just asset managers, insurance, banks etc. taking their cut before passing returns/loses through to the end risk holder. The average institutional ownership of companies in the S&P500 for example is also ~80%.
None of this takes away from the point that Broadcom is absolutely run like a PE firm as the original commenter noted.
Not surprising given the CEO was appointed by KKR/Silverlake 20 years ago.
They are a PE firm