Fiduciary duty.
This is a good short video on what fiduciary duty means:
This is the nuclear bomb the Right has in the culture war.
Wokness is unpopular with mainstream America.
Disney cannot put the interests of a minority of woke employees over the financial interests of it shareholders.
If Disney’s fuckery costs them money, Right wing shareholders need to find lawyers to sue Disney executives for breach of fiduciary duty.
If we want to win we need to start dropping fiduciary duty bombs on woke corporations.
Which is the bigger threat? A bunch of angry Tweets from the internet woke hate mob or a bunch of angry shareholders and their army of lawyers?
Unfortunately, the Woke mind-virus has already claimed the most prestigious law schools and has been making steady gains in large parts of Big Law. Remember the recent kerfuffles with the progressives attempting to “BDS” any law firms that represented Pres. Trump, his family members, or private businesses he used to own? Or the similar situation of blackballing any criminal defense attorneys who represented the January 6 “insurrectionists”?
Yes, but that doesn’t infect all lawyers, it should still be perfectly feasible to do what J suggests.
The “fiduciary duty” issue is the explanation for the left pushing for “stakeholders” as the ones to be considered, which is meant as a catch-all term for “whoever we want to claim cares about what the company does”. The “stakeholder” notion is specifically intended to destroy the idea that boards are accountable to shareholders and to them alone.
There’s one other complication: a woke board could claim that they are acting within their fiduciary duty, by protecting the company from the reputational damage that going against the woke mob would bring to them. They wouldn’t put it quite so plainly, of course, but that’s what it amounts to. In other words, the argument is that paying the Danegeld is the best option for the company.
The “woke” have no problem re-defining any term they want to in order to fit their needs. This will be no different.
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The Twitter board holds a fiduciary duty to the stockholders. I have no doubt they think destroying stock value is upholding that duty. Because it is more important to prevent conservative voices from being heard than to maintain stock value. In fact, they are likely convinced that each and every stockholder would be thrilled to lose their shirts in order to keep Musk from controlling the company.
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I have no doubt they will sleep just fine at night, secure in the knowledge they did the right thing.
Not just Disney. Twitter, too.
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Elon Musk offered $46.5 billion to purchase the company outright, which is about $6 billion more than its net worth. (15% over actual value)
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Twitter’s board has a fiduciary duty to seriously consider such a generous offer, and if they choose to reject it they’d better come up with a DAMN good reason. “We don’t like Musk” probably won’t cut it if a shareholder decides to sue claiming breach of duty.
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Edit: CBMTTek beat me to it, but I stand by it. 🙂
I’ve been pushing a different two words for a few years now: “securities fraud.”
When corporate officers are making public statements – even unofficial ones – about the company’s purpose and operation that are at odds with the way the company is actually being run, they can get in a serious heap of trouble.
Of course, that doesn’t apply when they and the State are in general agreement. We have a government of political factions, not of laws.
Oh, and another thing to note: there are actually layers of fiduciary duty here, as much of the investment capital doesn’t belong to the people making the investment decisions. The big investors are institutions, investing on behalf of institutions, playing with the money of pension funds and such.
I saw an article suggesting that the Florida state pension fund (courtesy a nudge from DeSantis) may be one of the hib investors leaning on Twitter to remember their duty.