I just don’t feel comfortable building a robot army here, and then being ousted because of some asinine recommendations from ISS and Glass Lewis, who have no f**king clue. I mean those guys are corporate terrorists. Lemme explain the core problem here, so many of the passive funds vote along the lines of what ISS and Glass Lewis recommend. Now, they have made many terrible recommendations in the past that if those recommendations had been followed would have been extremely destructive to the future of the company. Now, If you’ve got passive funds that essentially defer responsibility for the vote to Glass Lewis and ISS, then you can have extremely disastrous consequences for a publicly traded company if too much of the publicly traded company is controlled by index funds. It’s de facto controlled by Glass Lewis and ISS. This is a fundamental problem for corporate governance, because they’re not voting along the lines that are actually good for shareholders. That’s the big issue, I mean, that’s what it comes down to. ISS Glass Lewis corporate terrorism. -Elon Musk, Tesla Q3 shareholder conference call, October 22, 2025
To be fair, all that money is effectively fake until the shares are sold.
Banks lend him real money based on the fake money
I count that in the sold category. Because they just get more loans to pay off the previous ones, or default and the bank just takes the shares and does it again because what the loaned is less than the share value. All the while avoiding income and capital gains taxes.
It’s why boycotts and cancelling subscriptions actually do work when done in large enough numbers. Their money can disappear very quickly if shareholders get spooked.
It’s also why Tesla isn’t being affected as much now despite Elon pulling the mask off and going full Nazi, resulting in massive sales drops. Years and years of short sellers and complicit media trying to tank the brand, largely funded and promoted by things like entrenched oil interests and competing car brands have trained many shareholders to ignore a lot.
this is the most naive thing I’ve read on lemmy… blessed be your innocent mind my child