“Just make me money. Your only job is to make me money. Your FIDUCIARY DUTY is to make me money. MAKE ME FUCKING MONEY.”
“Okay, we’re going to take this stance which will make even MORE money.”
“Wait wait wait wait wait.”
That’s literally the definition of not following their fiduciary duty (in the modern, insane, definition of fiduciary duty).
In the real world, Disney believes it will make 28 gazillion dollars a year by combating obvious and hugely visible evil. There’s fiduciary duty for you.
You do care. You care deeply. Disney, the conservative champion who discriminated for decades, now finds it makes more money by catering to the entire population and not the segment who most loudly hates. It looked at the world and asked itself whether to support your bigotry or whether it can make even more money by not doing so. It can’t do both anymore.
Pick a side.
And that public duty is to not support blatant bigotry, racism and ignorance.
Look, Disney went quietly along with a lot of other Florida Man bullshit. But sometimes, too much is too much.
In other news The Florida Secretary of Education reportedly said that teachers should not mention a certain planet, as saying “Uranus” may lead to a life of Sodomy. He also castigated MATH textbooks for supporting sodomy, “gay rights” and “wokeness”.
https://www.reddit.com/r/facepalm/comments/u90p9o/only_in_florida/
This sort of ignorance and bigotry is wrong, and a desire for some extra dividends instead of fighting it is also wrong.
Disney does put the bottom line first, but they also would like to do what’s right.
No doubt, that’s next.
Yep. Fascism is a form of Populism, but one of the main differences is blaming societies ills, crime, and so forth on minorities. Note that the Nazis rounded up Gays also. DeSantis is blaming everything on Gays, etc, Abbott on Migrants, and so forth. This is exactly how fascism gets started.
Sane, non bigoted people can have a reasonable debate on guns or abortions. But only bigoted racist assholes deny a minority their rights.
As much as I would like to dump more on Florida’s governor and education henchmen, that part about Uranus seems to be satire.
It’s not grounds for a lawsuit because of something called the business judgement rule.
As long as the officers of a company are making decisions on an informed basis and are not putting their self-interest above the interests of the company, they haven’t breached their fiduciary duty.
The law doesn’t require the company to be right all the time. Boards of directors are allowed to make decisions that cost the company money. They might make those decisions deliberately to avoid damaging their brand or image, or they might make a mistake. But it doesn’t matter. Companies aren’t legally required to be right all the time. And as long as the board members don’t act in their own self-interest they’ve met the burden of their fiduciary duty. They don’t have to act in your best interests to meet it.
If you do not not like the way the company is run, you have recourse. If you can find and organize enough shareholders that feel the way you do, you can install yourself or your representatives on the board - although many large companies are structured in a way that makes this impossible. Alternatively, you can sell your shares.
But you can’t sue over executive decisions unless you can prove self-dealing, fraud or gross negligence.
Per your link, it’s not their self-interest that’s the question; it’s whether they’re “acting in the interests of the corporation and its stakeholders.” It adds that, as long as it’s not the case that they “acted against the interests of the firm and its stakeholders, courts will not question their decisions.” And I get that, if they conclude that Legal Course Of Action X would be in the interests of the stakeholders, and they do X but turn out to have gotten it wrong, they have a pretty low informed-basis bar to clear; but I’m asking, if they informedly conclude that X would be in the interests of the stakeholders, and they say so and then do Y, then — per your link — what follows?
I said reportedly. However, he did cancel bunches of math textbooks over similar ignorant , bigoted issues.
Pretty sure that’s satire, I see a different name when i look up that position
There is one, and only one, way to prevent that – don’t own their stock.
It is precisely because the poutraged right understands this fact and its long-term implications that they are becoming increasingly noisy out of desperation.
You got me this time!
Is the math in Miller’s example (which demonstrates that their revenue, i.e. core mission, depends on its stance on Issue X) from one of those textbooks that is excluded from Florida schools to keep out the Critical Race Theory cooties?
Unless all the directors are clinically insane, they aren’t going to make an official determination that decision A serves the interest of the company and it’s stakeholders in every way, decision B is adverse to the interest of the company and it’s stakeholders in every way, then go with decision B unless decision B benefits them in some way.
The board is the sole determinant as to what constitutes the best interest of the company. The can decide it’s in the best interest to spend lots of money to associate their brand with progressive values. They can decide that promoting their Christian values is a priority, and if that causes them to buy a bunch of stolen bliblical artifacts, then they may have made a mistake, but it’s a mistake they’re allowed to make.
I maintain that the only way to prove that a board acted deliberately against the interest of the company is to prove that the action benefited themselves or a third party that they had a vested interest in helping.
I get that you are maintaining that there is a hypothetical where they might deliberately make a decision that they know will damage the company without conferring any benefit to the company, and that decision will also not confer any benefit to themselves or anyone they know.
If you want to present this hypothetical, I’d love to discuss it, but I’m drawing a blank.
Not addressed to me, but I’m interested in your thoughts on this matter, so I have a semi-realistic hypothetical.
So, let’s say that Musk buys enough twitter to have a controlling interest in it, and he really hates twitter. He doesn’t mind losing his investment, he just wants to destroy the company.
I assume that shareholders would have standing in that instance?
Under the law of most states, he would owe the other shareholders a fiduciary duty as controlling shareholder.
My IANAL opinion is a very qualified yes, because I think that if he’d actually announced an intention to destroy the company, he would would be putting his self-interest ahead of that of the company. Self-interest doesn’t necessarily mean financial self-interest, your self-interest could be the advancement of your “brand” as a world class asshole and your burning desire to act maliciously against people you don’t like. But ultimately it would depend on what actions he took to destroy the company.
If he legitimately gains a controlling interest, there are probably a lot of things he could do, like drastically change the moderation policy, that would fall under the business judgement rule. Some of those things might have deleterious effects on the business and might even ultimately destroy it without the shareholders having much of a chance of legal recourse.
Now, if he did something egregious like invest the companies cash reserves into LGB coin, the shareholders would have a good case. If he just mismanaged it into the ground, there would probably be a bunch of lawsuits and it would depend if they could prove financial self-dealing, fraud or malice. The fact that he’d announced his intention to destroy the company would go a long way towards proving malice, but it might not be enough on its own.
Yes, you personally can. You’re not being discriminated against.
It’s just self-interest if you oppose discrimination when it’s directed against you. What good people do is oppose discrimination even when they are not the target of it.
So, yes, Lester Maddox. Really.
This makes total sense, not just legally, but because no one can know what policies in this arena would be financially best for Disney.
I know several families that spend what is by my standards an insane amount of time time and money at Walt Disney World. All are Trumpers except in one case where I think they mostly vote libertarian, at least for President. .
So far, I think they are all too used to loving Disney for the alleged wokeness to affect their vacation plans. But there must be some tipping point where the idea of Disney=Democrats gets so strong it turns them away.
Perhaps for gay visitors, the tipping point might have been Disney’s silence on the probably misnamed “Parental Rights in Education” bill, if Disney had been silent. Or maybe not. Does Disney run customer focus groups on this stuff? I rather doubt it, because of fear of bad publicity if it came out that focus groups drive their public statements, rather than principle.
As for employess, again there could be a tipping point, maybe one that leasds to unionization. They sure need it.
But no one really knows where these tipping points are, until they tip. Disney executives have to guess.
I assume that, since you don’t think that corporations should be involved in politics, you’re actively lobbying to have Citizen’s United overturned?