If you want to know more: starbucks, a vanguard/blackrock company, with msft CEO has massive debts and stabucks is paying huge interests all year long.
The ceo of Starbucks is Howard Schultz one of the long time people associated with Starbucks. This is his third time being CEO including the period that made Starbucks a household name and when it went public. He’s not at all associated with Vanguard or Blackrock.
The next CEO was chosen by the board in a very public CEO search. Laxman Narasimhan has the pedigree you’d expect from someone picked for that role including being a ceo of a big company and a long stretch at Pepsi.
Perhaps you can be specific about what you think Vanguard or Blackrock did as part of this process that caused a three time ceo & founder of Starbucks to be chosen as the interim and then followed by what appears to be a highly qualified candidate?
Vanguard and Blackrock buy companies as part of their size in the market. Literally a published equation. By definition if a company is a large part of the public markets they will own a big portion of it.
In Vanguards case, that ownership is a direct pass through to the people buying into those indexes. Do the ultimate ownership is dispersed.
Do you have any point other than “big index funds own the correct percentage of the market they index?”
It is extremely simple: biggest share holders have a significant weight at deciding who are directors on the board (then the management teams), and those are usually their ppl.
As you write more about this, you don't manage to make it sound less like a conspiracy theory. But that's helpful; I know how to interpret what you were saying upthread now. Thanks for responding.
Have you looked into how vanguard/blackrock claim to decide these things? My understanding is that they used to just go with what the company management wanted and now contract the work out to some specialised firm that tells them the reasonable vote to make whenever they come up. There are a few of these specialised firms who are shared by the big investment funds.
I don’t think blackrock/vanguard exercise much influence. Do they even meet with management? But each year, Larry Fink writes a letter to companies black rock holds saying they should be sustainable or whatever. But I don’t think there are consequences for the companies for ignoring the letter. Big funds are mostly passive and so just follow their formula. S&P surely have a bigger influence on vanguard’s holdings by what they choose to include in their indexes.
But I do weakly find the ‘index funds reduce competition’ theory plausible. Eg in 2020, Pfizer’s big investors probably most wanted Pfizer to cooperate with competitors to help end covid, causing share prices everywhere to recover, rather than working to get a bigger share of the covid vaccine pie.
Usually wikipedia has the info, and few sites list the same info and sometime more, for instance the debts of the company (some profits are sucked out with the huge interests of those massive debts).
Usually a good start is gogol (a vanguard/blackrock company!): "who owns tesla".
Amazon for instance: JB is in full control, with azure/vanguard/blackrock right behind.
If you want to know more: starbucks, a vanguard/blackrock company, with msft CEO has massive debts and stabucks is paying huge interests all year long.
Public info.