So, if it's not okay for me to buy their stock, is it okay to make them giving me a bunch of their stock part of the deal? Like "I will buy a billion dollars worth of your merchandise for $1.5 billion, and you will give me the merchandise plus $500 million of your stock?"
Yes because in that case you’re acquiring the stock directly from the company as part of a planned transaction. In one case you’d be dealing with individual uninformed shareholders which would cause a lack of confidence in markets (the entire reason insider trading rules were created), in the other you aren’t.
