I don't know how it went down at all, but I can relate a story about a dot com casualty that I helped purchase. The company's assets were bought from the investors, as far as I could tell that transaction happened between the board of directors at the company where I worked, and their board of directors. The "cover story" that their board told their CEO and CTO was that they should consider taking us over, and we went over and talked to everyone and did some technical due diligence. I found both the CEO and CTO fairly annoying with their "why would we want to buy you?" attitude.
Then on Monday the week after that get together our CEO told us they had purchased "certain assets" of that company and we should "hire" anyone who we thought was good, we had a spreadsheet with their time of service and salary info. And a green light to just move them into our org with the same salary. They came right across as a horizontal transfer as far as the employees were concerned.
I know for a fact that it surprised the heck out of the CEO as when we went over there to talk to people his office monitor was sitting on the floor and the CRT tube was broken. And we never saw any of the senior management after that one time. Definitely left a sour taste and it reminded me how "expensive" it was to take bridge funding.
