This is a bit tangential to the topic, but shareholder voting is interesting enough anyway.
* Musk will vote, for obvious reasons.
* Big institutional funds almost always vote with the board of directors recommendations. They very rarely rock the boat for a lot of mostly good reasons.
* Private shareholders with a sizable stake likely will vote.
* Retail shareholders (i.e. you and I) are notorious for not voting. Case in point: AMC is mostly held by retail investors at this point and had to go through all sorts of shenanigans to be able to increase the maximum number of shares they could issue, because that typically requires a shareholder vote that simply wouldn't ever get enough total votes to pass.
Institutional holders tend to vote along the direction recommended by ISS or Glass-Lewis.
Those recommendations do generally follow Board recommendations on strategic topics, but frequently diverge from the board on matters of employee and executive pay (approving increases to share/option pools, etc.)
Ah, you're right! I'm now remembering that Vanguard mentions something like this for their default voting methodology, among the few choices they now allow investors to choose from.
I receive emails from Schwab and it seems very straightforward -- there is a personalized link sent to your email, you click it and start to vote. It shows how many shares your have, what the questions are along with the board's recommendations are. No login. Probably not the most secure process but very easy and smooth
Robinhood is a brokerage, and should be passing proxy ballots through to you for companies you hold shares in.
It's arguable whether Vanguard should allow this, and whether it'd matter at the end. Vanguard is for retail investors who want to invest their money as cheaply as possible without thinking hard about it. Delivering proxy ballots, even electronically, does have a cost, and would likely make such funds slightly but noticeably more expensive. And to what benefit? After all, most retail investors don't care to vote. If you strongly care about your shareholder voice, the better solution is to buy shares in the company directly.
That said, Vanguard now lets you select from some broader voting methodologies (e.g. Vanguard's default, ESG, or "good corporate governance"). But nothing specific like "good corporate governance, except screw Musk over/always favor Musk".
Vanguard supports accounts that holds mutual funds (most of their focus/business) but also has accounts that can hold individual stocks.
In the individual stock case, Vanguard absolutely has to allow those share owners to vote their shares.
In the mutual fund case, Vanguard is the investor in the shares and Vanguard is the one who should cast the vote for those shares. End investors are invested in the mutual fund, and so could vote on mutual fund proxies, but IMO, should not be permitted to vote on the underlying shares that the mutual fund is invested in.
Vanguard lets you vote if you own individual shares. Vanguard owns the underlying shares for my units of VTI, so they get the votes. I absolutely do not want to vote on every individual stock in VTI.
1. You typically can't leave your country. Hardly anyone offers open immigration, especially not to blue collar workers.
2. Companies don't care about employees and almost never offer raises. It's not 1920. Even if you love your company, it's almost always best to be looking to make sure you're getting the pay that you deserve. At a company you don't even like, I think it's a disservice to your career.
3. Staying promotes bad behavior as corporations will see that they can under pay you, behave poorly, and not suffer the cost of turnover.
I've moved country. Had to learn German as part of that[0].
Jobs… well, other Space companies do exist, but the old space companies have a reputation for being pork barrel operations. Other car companies exist, I don't know enough about them to make a judgement call there.
[0] Fun fact: German is so hard that Germans have a saying which translates as "German is hard".
You are an extremely privileged citizen of a first-world country. Try doing it as a Russian / Lebanon / Afghan, then we'll have something to talk about.
But I suspect the "can code" privilege beats the "passport" privilege.
A previous employer was about 50 people, of whom about 5 were from Germany; from memory, the nationalities of the rest, excluding those from G7 states, included Nigeria, Egypt, Syria, both Israel and Palestine, Iran, both Russia and Ukraine, Azerbaijan, Turkey, both India and Pakistan, Nepal, Sri Lanka, Bangladesh, and South Korea.
A British ex girlfriend of mine thought I was ridiculously privileged for having had a Commodore 64 when I was a kid; the (also British) boyfriend before her, got into ham radio because he came from a household too poor for a telephone.
> But I suspect the "can code" privilege beats the "passport" privilege.
It doesn't and it's not even close. Millions of Russians have left the country in protest of Putin's little victorious war. Many of them are very adept at coding, and no, almost all of them face severe problems of every kind (banking, visas, residency, air flights, etc) because of the wrong color of their passports. And for people from non-European countries it is even worse.
It would be selection bias to point out that none of the Russians I've worked with mentioned any such problems. Even of the non-Europeans, only the Nigerian mentioned an issue.
Oh, just realised I forgot about the Mexicans, Brazilians, and Argentinian in the previous list.
A completely unrelated Russian has mentioned that his parents had to explain to the Russian conscription department that he wasn't in the country, but that's as close as it gets.
Still, like I said, selection bias. I can only see the ones who could get out.
Complaining in press about CEO is unlikely to make anything better.
Also, said CEO is wildly successful by any sensible business metric, so this boils down to pleasing the crowd of people who are unhappy with CEOs political stance.
So you are a quitter? That's fine, but obviously that's just one choice of the options available: Exit, Voice, and Loyalty. Albert Hirschman wrote a nice book about it. I can recommend it.
Looks to be going the other way despite the complaints. I'm pretty sure that money makes all the decisions. Investors don't really care what Musk's political stance is. And they care even less if he's annoying to social media consumers, unless they represent a target market larger than the one they already have.
TSLA down 55% from its all time high in Nov 2021. Performance of other stocks/indices in the same period: QQQ(+6.5%), S&P(+7.4%), Toyota(+28%).
So yeah, Musk is doing poorly these days. It doesn't help his case when people look at his other antics like Twitter and legitimately wonder if he is getting distracted and should be replaced.
Sorry but that is such a high-school level "just discovered libertarianism" take.
You think Musk cares about liquidity?
That most banks in would not issue him an 8 figure loan in a heartbeat?
Stock is not simply control, it's leverage, potential collateral etc...
It is not about a number in a bank account, billionaires do not even play the same game as you and me.
Dude could personally be in billions of debt, and still get to buy a couple yachts on a whim.
You can't fathom the inordinate amount of wealth and leverage a billionaire has; and it has never been about liquidity.
Yet your entire comment is essentially saying "He can do things I can't do!". So? Who cares? What's your point?
Mine was that he doesn't have billions in cash, and by extension movements such as "tax billionaires until they are millionaires" makes zero sense. I've seen people advocate "tax billionaires to pay for UBI!", which of course is another "makes no sense" approach.
Why?
Well, let's pretend that someone with $50B in worth has $50B in cash. OK. So you take everyone that has >$1B in the US, take everything over that, and apply it to UBI. Guess what? You pay for one year of UBI. One year. Yet.. now.. there are no more billionaires left!
Of course the above doesn't track, as my point about "net worth" is that those $50B aren't cash, they're mostly ownerships in companies. Which means that the government is effectively going to have to seize those stocks, and force sell those stocks, but.. um, to who? Remember, there are now no more billionaires left!
Who would by all those stocks, now that there are no more billionaires? Certainly the market would crash completely, by offloading trillions in worth overnight. And we'd have moved into an entirely government run corporate economy, as the government now has majority voting rights on a large number of companies. Yay?
And still next year, no more money for UBI.
You stated that my take is only "high school" level, but it seems to me this communist "take all the money from billionaires" thought process is not even high school level. It's not thought through.
And part of that thought process is "What does the net worth of a billionaire mean"?
And of course, the above is complete nonsense too, as many companies are owned by other companies. Which eventually end back at investors.
So what do you do? If a company is owned by a company, owned by a billionaire, you then .. what, take that company? What if it's a bank investment fund worth billions, but oh no! Some of those investors are rich! Do you take that?
What's the goal here? To prevent individuals from steering large companies? Which of course isn't entirely the case, there are boards of directors (see this specific Musk case!).
And how do you deal with those horrible foreign billionaires? You can't tax them directly, so do you just take their stocks? The lesson being, "If I invest in US companies, they'll just take my money!".
None of this is thought out clearly by anyone I speak to, except "Those dasteredly billionaires have, and I don't, so take take take!".
Googling around, it looks like:
- 13% of Tesla is owned by Musk. He will vote I guess?
- The other big shareholders are funds. Do those vote?
- What percentage of private shareholders vote? I guess people who don't live in the US can't vote, even if they wanted?