Exactly, by paying the miners NOT to hash you remove them from the competition, then you PAY them to hash for you.
So, you buy their hashing power... how is this not just paying for majority hash?
Assuming 5% profit margin:
All miners are currently paying an electric bill of $6000 every 10 minutes and earning BTC worth $6300 for a net profit of $300.
It is commonly believed that an attacker would have to spend $6001 every 10 minutes to get 50.01% away from these miners.
Technically speaking the attacker only needs to pay the existing miners $1 more every 10 minutes and the miners could defect for a higher pay rate and the attacker gives them a long-term contract for $301 every 10 minutes for their hash power. The long-term contract protects the miners against any volatility in BTC price as a result of the attack resulting in the attacker having total costs of $1 + $300*PERCENT_DECLINE_IN_BTS_PRICE as a result of the attack.
Miners have a business model with ever-decreasing profit margins so their job positions have ever decreasing salaries. Therefore there is no long-term upside to supporting BTC for miners and they would be foolish to not sell out to someone offering them a better long-term income.
Negative mining is just an approach to push pools out of business and concentrate power in the hands of large mining farms which you can then negotiate with.
A large mining farm would be foolish to do anything other than negative mining on the public pools. Large public pools serve to allow more competition and thus lower overall margins.
Hence if I owned 10% of all hashing power, I would use it entirely for negative mining until the pools collapsed and then switch to solo-mining. This would maximize my long-term profits and secure my position of control.