What evidence is there to indicate the board of directors or CEO of one of the world’s richest and most profitable businesses is controlled by much less powerful and less wealthy Wall St investment firms and hedge fund managers?
A lot of "rich" tech CEOs don't have massive amounts of cash, they have big equity stakes in their companies. It's paper wealth strongly tied to their company's share price.
Many of these companies' share prices is heavily influenced because a handful of hedge funds own a majority of the shares. For example, look at Pinterest: the general public makes of 11.7% of share owners while institutional investors make up 74% of share owners.
If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich. Most of these tech companies also have compensation structure where employee income is also significantly in stock, a price dump could cause mass attrition which can trigger a death spiral.
If you look at activist investors letters to Twitter, Pinterest, Google from hedge funds like Elliott Management, their pressure to cut employees compensation, employee perks, etc....this isn't some conspiracy theory. Wall Street hedge funds absolutely have massive influence on Silicon Valley tech companies because ultimately they do still control the purse strings.
> a handful of hedge funds own a majority of the shares
> institutional investors
Hedge funds are a minority of institutional investors. Most of those institutional investors are companies like Vanguard or BlackRock, who in turn just hold shares on behalf of their customers; basically, anyone who contributes to a 401k with a "Vanguard Target Retirement 2060 Fund" or whatever.
> If those hedge funds all decide they're unhappy with the "rich CEO's" decision, they can dump the shares all at once, it will tank the price, and the CEO's are no longer rich.
This is true, but the funds will also lose money (or miss out on gains in the future). Activist investors like Elliott absolutely do exist, but most AUM is managed by non-activist investors. Elliott, for example, had $71B in AUM as of last year; Vanguard alone was over 100x the size in that same year.
You could make the same argument about the US government, and yet the "much less powerful and less wealthy" groups still have a ton of influence over it. You are expecting it to make perfect logical sense, when it could all be very easily explained with one word: greed.
Stop giving them the benefit of the doubt and stop believing that the ultra rich don't all work together to take more of your money, because they do, they have been forever, and they continue to do so forever.
A simpler explanation for Microsoft’s actions is that the Microsoft board of directors and CEO wanted those actions to occur, for their own benefit.
The whole hedge fund manager and Wall St boogeyman is nonsense. Who even is “Wall St”? Lots of people own shares of Microsoft. There are probably a bunch of people who influence Microsoft’s leaders more than some paper pushers in NYC.
The ownership of Microsoft is so diffuse, I am just asking for some evidence or even who these “Wall St” and “hedge funds” are that somehow control the hiring/firing decisions of a business that is 100x bigger and more profitable than them.
