Glass Lewis

She said it has to be a very good deal in order to pass the shareholder vote on Tesla's side and that a bad proposal would harm both Tesla and SpaceX.

Tesla shareholders would be giving up voting rights, which means a lot to institutions and organizations like the ISS and Glass Lewis.

On this topic, I know a lot of you have written off Gary Black completely because of his commentary around autonomy, which I understand, but I do think it's a baby and a bathwater situation.

But he said we should be looking at what happened to Lumentum holding stock this morning after Marvell offered a 24% premium to Lumentum holders.

We back you.

Another big one, Glass Lewis, and this is one of the big two, again, completely backed Bergeron, said get rid of Ethan Allen's existing board and the CEO, Bergeron should take over.

The final one, ISS, interestingly split its vote.

So of the five board members, it said you should put three new board members on, including Doug Bergeron, and keep two Ethan Allen investors.

They've raised $150 million more in capital.

Ted Cruz probes Glass-Lewis ISS after they oppose Texas moves.

This is important.

Bloomberg Law reporting today that Senate Commerce Committee Chairman Ted Cruz, our senator, questioning whether these investor recommendations from Glass-Lewis and institutional shareholder services were tainted by political consideration after they opposed corporate moves to Texas.

And they're going to investigate.

And we know from these two services that make recommendations to shareholders that We're pretty certain that, well, it's actually fairly clear, in my opinion, that they're just pushing political agendas.

So what we do to keep things efficient, we hire an external proxy voting agent.

And in our case, that's Glass Lewis.

And they do the voting on our behalf.

And according to a very standardized policy with maybe an ESG overlay, but in a very passive way.

And shockingly, we went to ballot on, uh, on this in Starbucks and Amazon and lost.

And that's partially because we had these proxy advisory firms like ISS and Glass Lewis a-advising clients to, to vote against our, um, our, our measures.

So- Anyway, this is a long story.

I didn't mean to, to get too far in the weeds here, but this is what I'm doing now, and this is sort of how it unfolded.

And you've got this weird situation where you have the BlackRock, State Street, Vanguards of the world, which, by the way, each of those has improved exponentially in the last few years.

So these aren't as bad as they were, but they are still incredibly powerful institutions.

And, uh, and they, in conjunction with proxy advisory firms like ISS and Glass Lewis, just exercise a, an astounding amount of control over corporate culture.

Now, fortunately, we are living in an era of pushback and correction, and so corporations are quickly walking back a lot of policies that they embraced wholeheartedly even three years ago.

However, yeah, so, you know, you're always going to run into that issue about personal agency and whose money is getting invested when you're dealing with public money.

But you're right to point out ISS and Glass-Lewis, you didn't name them, but the proxy advisory firms and the way they advise workers.

on voting and that is a highly political thing and people rely on them people firms big big firms because you know because there are so many companies out there that are pulled into let's just say we're talking a mutual fund rather than etf or whatever you can do etf there's so many it's hard to like know how to vote and all these things it's just like impossible to do all the calculations and follow all the corporations and do all that stuff So people have become dependent on these proxy advisory services to do it.

And these are two foreign firms, and their advisory lean, so to speak, is demonstrably left.

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Proxy firm Glass-Lewis is against Elon Musk's proposed $1 trillion TESLA-PAY package Glass-Lewis joined the institutional shareholder services in advising against Elon Musk's proposed $1 trillion pay package.

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Elon Musk expresses concern over Microsoft's role in OpenAI Explore Microsoft's early strategies to gain influence over OpenAI, Inc., including discounted cloud deals and marketing ploys.

AI.

Marion joined Parnassus in 2022 from Uber, where she was head of ESG strategy and engagement, and has also worked in ESG and stewardship roles at Charles Schwab, Chevron and Glass Lewis, while Krishna is a portfolio manager of the $5.4 billion Parnassus Value Equity Fund and the Parnassus Value Select Before we start, a quick reminder for our listeners.

To find out more about the topics covered in this podcast and much more, visit our website, responsible-investor.com, where we produce award-winning news and analysis on all aspects of sustainable investment, from regulation and standards to stewardship data and disclosure, as well as covering key themes including climate mitigation and adaptation, transition finance, nature, and human and labor rights.

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Those retail votes are the ones that decide close calls to Tesla.

Last year, proxy advisors ISS and Glass Lewis told institutions to vote against Musk's new pay package, and it passed anyway on the back of retail support.

The XAI vote at the same meeting is the better example.

Shareholders put forward a proposal for Tesla to invest in Musk's AI startup, and the board made no recommendation.