A merger or acquisition would only happen if the buyer expected to make money from the transaction. This looks like an Even Bigger Fool Theory. It is a little different because the CEO could take dividends whereas I, as a stockowner, cannot.
Potentially, a company's performance being good would motivate someone else to buy the company. But what I'm getting out of this is that you don't buy (dividendless) stocks because a company's doing well but ONLY if A) you think they will be sold or Bigger Fool Theory
If a company has a billion dollars more cash than liabilities, it's worth at least a billion dollars in a M&A deal today. You don't need a bigger fool, just someone who's willing to wind down a business to net assets. See what happened to Yahoo as a creative example of this - the operating business was a net liability, but it owned a good chunk of valuable Alibaba stock that made the stock positive-value, so it got split up, sold off, and wound down.
The dividends don't matter, IMO. It's net assets and net profits that do.
Potentially, a company's performance being good would motivate someone else to buy the company. But what I'm getting out of this is that you don't buy (dividendless) stocks because a company's doing well but ONLY if A) you think they will be sold or Bigger Fool Theory
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Greater_fool_theory