People that own one type of share of Pivotal are getting $15 per share for them. Dell, which owns a different type of share, is exchanging the Pivotal shares for VMWare shares. Because the shares of Pivotal and VMWare have different values, it isn't a 1:1 exchange, the VMWare shares are treated as being ~20 times more valuable.

I would say the transaction is mostly boring accounting, not anything weird. Who knows if Pivotal should operate as part of VMWare instead of independently, but once you decide to do that, you have to consolidate the ownership somehow.

An aside, the difference in the shares is so that Dell could keep control of the company while selling some of it on the stock market. I wonder if there is a good analysis of how companies with closely held control do over time.

In simple English

Context: Dell has large stakes in both Pivotal and VMware

VMware buys Pivotal. Pivotal's regular shareholders get paid in cash per share ($15). Dell, which owns a separate class of shares, gets paid in VMware shares rather than cash. This is likely because Dell already has a large cash balance and they don't need any more cash.

Large stake? Dell owns both, it's a move to rescue the tailspin that Pivotal's stock price is in.

Potentially.

"Financial Engineering" Why make anything anymore when you can do tricks with, and for money?

"Software Engineering" Why make anything anymore when you can do tricks with ones and zeroes, for money?

They do make stuff. Idea is to make next generation software worse than previous generation. Make money by fiddling with those agile JIRA/Storyboards and endless bug fixing.

I don't know if this was financial engineering because Dell bought EMC/VMWare but it was the smaller company, so this is a way to just increase the ownership they have rather than take cash out of the company which they use to make purchases. I'm not a FA expert, only TA, but that's my thought here.