Letters from Sanford Street # 542

So one shareholder proposal that I did vote in favor for was for the recapitalization proposal for the Ford Motor Company, where each share gets one vote, which I thought should usually be the case, even though I'm aware that certain class shares have different voting rights, and some shares have no voting rights at all. There was a statement in favor stating something like, the Ford family has an outsized level of control of the company relative to the amount of capital at stake, the other statement was that it's somewhat of a standard practice among newer companies to convert founder's shares into common shares after a set number of years.


Thinking about the other side of the discussion, that the shares should not be recapitalized, I thought that, maybe, sometimes businesses stay private forever like S. C. Johnson & Son, Inc. and maybe the reason they do that is so that the founding family doesn't lose control of the company, and maybe having share classes with different voting multiples is the solution to taking private companies public and keeping more or less everyone involved happy.


I don't really think I own more than a handful of shares of any particular company, but, in many ways I really enjoy reading the shareholder proposals and all that, more than the rest of the proxy statement.

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Letters from Sanford Street # 541 352

Letters from Sanford Street # 541