Matt Levine’s Money Stuff: The AI Will Vote the Shares

Proxy advisers

We talked in November about proxy voting at US public companies. My basic point was that, if you own a diversified portfolio of stocks, you will be asked to vote on hundreds of different propositions — annual elections of directors, non-binding social and environmental proposals, the occasional merger — each year. Almost none of these votes will matter to you economically, and your vote is vanishingly unlikely to matter to any of the companies. In the abstract, in the aggregate, shareholder voting is the foundation of corporate democracy, a way to make sure that managers are answerable to the ultimate ...