[derefr]

> The only way "investors" can control a publicly traded company that isn't dependent on issuing new stock is by depressing the executive comp package's value.

Or, y'know, if the Board — which is always composed of shareholders, who are, in public companies, expected to hold the stock value as their primary interest over the internal interests of the company, whether or not they're also officers of the company — operates by firing-and-replacing the CEO whenever the CEO does something the market responds sufficiently-negatively to. Or just makes it clear to the CEO that that's what will happen. (This is, in principle, where the infamous hypothetical "duty to shareholders" is supposed to come from. It's not a law; it's the market's ability to transitively fire the CEO through a share-price-incentivized Board.)

[AlchemistCamp]

At least in the case of Google and Facebook, the owners have a different class of stock that has enough voting power that they cannot be fired by outside shareholders.

[derefr]

In public companies, majority (rather than plurality) shareholders who are also the officers of the company (i.e. where the CEO doesn't have to listen to the Board, because the CEO "is" the Board for all intents and purposes) are the exception, not the norm. Most companies have sold off an internal controlling interest by the time they go public. And, if they survive in the market, most other companies that kept an internal controlling interest initially, end up selling it off once all the founders leave or retire. (In fact, insofar as you can think of a retired founder as now having the interests of an external shareholder, the process is almost a tautology.)

For the relevant example, Nintendo's shareholdership — https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/en/stock/information/index.htm... — is composed of "47.43% Foreign Institutions and Individuals" (this category usually meaning "foreign investors"), and "31.07% Japanese Financial Institutions" (i.e. domestic investors.) So, (more than) 78.5% of Nintendo is externally owned. These are not voting shares, but that doesn't matter; they're a majority of shares, so they're controlling shares in practice: even if you can't vote, you can still do a coordinated dump of the company's stock to signal your displeasure. Thus, the institutional shareholders with these shares drive board allocation in a game-theoretic sense, rather than a legal sense.

That's why you see some very mysterious people (https://www.nintendo.co.jp/corporate/en/officer/index.html) on Nintendo's Board, specifically on an "Audit and Supervisory Committee" (a.k.a. "the actual Board; composed of people we didn't pick and don't really want here, but were strong-armed into taking by threats to do things to our share price; who can veto any decision made by the rest of the Board.") These are either large individual shareholders, or are "ambassadors" for the interests of institutional shareholders, or both.

Takuya Yoshimura is "Vice President at Mizuho Securities" — pretty clear why he's there. Asa Shinkawa works for an M&A company. Masao Yamazaki, retired Japanese railway tycoon, is likely there as a representative of his friends' institutional interests (and maybe the interests of some, er, "groups" in Japan); while Katsuhiro Umeyama, accounting-firm CEO, is there in a more formal (but not formalized) capacity to put a literal external auditor / comptroller lens on Nintendo's spending on behalf of whichever companies think that's needed.

Make no mistake — these people on this "Audit and Supervisory Committee" can get a Nintendo CEO or "President" fired, if they don't like their last-quarter decisions and resulting stock performance. That's pretty much all they can do; but in theory it's enough to steer the company, as they can just keep rolling the dice until they get a President whose policies happen to already align with theirs.