Comment It is stupid (Score 2, Informative) 110
If they own a piece of the company, they get to demand whatever they want. The rest of the investors can demand something else.
Let me take a moment to feel sorry for the poor executives who have to take an extra minute after every such proposal to throw it in a trash can. I know it's taking valuable time away from managing their disinformation campaigns so they can keep poisoning the planet for profit.
I own Tesla stock and this comes up at every annual shareholder meeting.
There's this one guy who owns 1 (that's 1, 0-n-e) share, and every year submits a proposal to remove Elon Musk as CEO. He gets no traction from any of the other shareholders.
There's a group that always proposes reporting on DEI efforts, which gets no traction.
There's a group that proposes that Tesla reports on human rights (such as whether their Cobalt is humanely mined).
There's a group that proposes something about human capital management, whatever that is.
And more recently, Elon Musk lost $56bn in compensation because he was sued by a heavy metal drummer that owns nine shares of Tesla stock.(*)
All of these are basically noise, or sand in the gears of a working company. All of these are followed by a statement that begins "The Board has considered this proposal and determined that it would not serve the best interests of Tesla or our stockholders
Each of these proposals has to be read, assessed, and printed up in schedule 14A and submitted to the SEC. It's a complete waste of time. There should be some rule that states that at least 10% of srockholders need to show support for a proposal before it is even considered.
It's effectively a DOS attack on the governance process.
(*) To be fair, the ruling stated that Musk's compensation was not impartially decided (essentially, that it was decided by Musk's friends and not impartial people) and from the evidence that seems to be the case, but it was a series of tranches that were based on Musk delivering results, it was voted on and passed by the shareholders, and removing the compensation completely *after* the deliverables were achieved seems very heavy handed, even political. Kevin O'Leary had nothing but bad things to say about the ruling, and he's a reasonably informed authority.