Has there been a case where buying company A before merging w/company B ended up better than buying company B with the same amount of money?

For example SolarCity before it was merged with Tesla, was it more advantageous to buy SolarCity when it almost out of business if you knew that it would end up getting merged with Tesla? Was the merged price fair or did SolarCity valuation get inflated when merged with Tesla?

I checked some old stock charts and I think the conversion would be about the same, 150 shares of SolarCity would be worth 15 shares of Tesla at that time back in 2015-2016 right? Anyone remember what it was like back then?