I tried researching this a bit, and from what I understand, the company basically has no money, which in turn makes the stock worthless. So since the stock is effectively $0.00 per share, they can just “cancel” the stock completely.

This could be oversimplified or dead wrong, but I don’t understand any other way this could work legally.

Often common stock implies the existence of preferred stock, i.e. the investors got paid out in low sale and everyone else had no money available. The increasingly dominant private equity corp biz probably got a great deal. The class divide widens as usual

Reading into this it’s likely a distressed asset sale, a bankruptcy in all but name. They’re toast and they know they’re toast, but instead of bankruptcy they sell all the assets. They then use the money to pay off in order: wages, debts, preferred shares, common shares. Sounds like this is preferred over bankrupty, which when you get the courts involved is expensive and time consuming (so fewer debt holders get their money).