How will CVS be able to buy Aetna for 69 billion if CVS only has 3 billion in cash without borrowing a large amount of money? I understand that a company can trade for a multiple larger than 1 of their assets but how can they buy other companies which cost much more than their assets? The market cap of CVS is 76 billion. This is what CVS shareholders currently are worth. How can they spend 69 billion of this and still own CVS? Wouldn't they have to give Aetna almost all of their CVS equity in exchange for Aetna's equity?
One way this would make sense would be if it is more of a merger and that Aetna shares will become CVS shares. So the value of the new CVS shares will be worth about the same as the value of the current CVS shares and the current Aetna shares. There would simply be more shareholders in the new company - all of the existing CVS shareholders plus all the existing Aetna shareholders.
In this case, I suppose I could buy a large company like Google even if I only had a company with a market cap of 1 million. Google's shareholders would simply own virtually all of the new combined company.