The 100% ownership is literal. From the press release: "The agreement has been approved by the sole shareholder of Lucasfilm."

I suppose that, in theory, he could have given away non-voting shares to some of his employees over time. But then I would have expected the press release to specify that he was the sole voting shareholder, rather than "the sole shareholder."

I don't really know much about the movie business, but my understanding is that new companies are incorporated for each individual movie project. The investors (of cash, franchise IP, or time) receive shares in that movie's corporation. Presumably the profits are then paid out as dividends, or the company is dissolved, and assets are distributed. That would explain why George Lucas never suffered any dilution on Lucasfilm, which presumably is just a shell whose main purpose is ownership of the various franchises and holding shares in the various sub-companies.

The whole shebang is owned by GWL. I once heard George say that he had no interest in going public. He wanted his companies to work on his projects before anything else, which cause a lot of grief at ILM some years ago.

Does anyone know what the largest modern transaction for a sole-owned company is?

Lucasfilm was essentially a holding company, so it's not unreasonable for him to own 100% of it.

I don't believe the subsidiaries (Skywalker Sound, LucasArts, ILM, etc) are wholly owned by Lucasfilms.

" the transaction value is $4.05 billion, with Disney paying approximately half of the consideration in cash and issuing approximately 40 million shares at closing."

Half of it is cash, that is $2.025B. Represents an a pretty healthy chunk of cash on top of the $2B in Disney stock. It will be interesting to see what he does next.

Hopefully he invests in immortality research. The trend of billionaires dying without even trying to engineer a solution is retarded.

He should start with focus ultrasound. It allows to grow/shrink any part of the body and so essentially reach immortality.

There's that carbonite process he looked into a long time ago.

Not sure it's applicable, it was in a galaxy far, far away.

Have you heard of Satanism ? Look it up. Has to do with this .. achieving immortality .. and sucking blood (energy) out of other people.

Oh yeah, it's real, black magic hasn't gone anywhere. Where do you think the ritual sacrifices would have disappeared ?

Actually, most Satanism has nothing to do with that.

Movie studios aren't like startups.

In the press statement they say it is $4 billion "transaction value", which tends to translate to enterprise value (not equity). So that $4bn number might be equity + net debt + any other provisions, etc.