As in, you agree than a couple insiders could control a large majority of a company, and that this percentages of the company would not be on the open market, and therefore even if you buy all of the shares that are available on the open market (and the definition that I am using would disclude these shares owned by these insiders), you would not control the company?
Sure, it's possible that at any given time people aren't offering to sell a majority of the voting power of stock, or (theoretically, at least) any voting stock at all (it's even possible that the only class of stock trading on the market is nonvoting; SNAP I think does that.)
I was taking issue with the particular claim, made twice in the direct chain of ancestry of this comment, that a company could simply hold the majority of it's voting stock itself, so that holding 100% of the shares not owned by the company would not give you control since the company itself (presumably, it's management) would exercise most of the voting rights. It doesn't work that way.
Let's chalk it up to a miscommunication.
If you have 100% of them, you have all voting rights.
Plenty of takeovers have been conducted on the open market, even without consent of the board, also known as a hostile takeover.
That's not the hypothetical that was posed.