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Thats fair, but in Costco's particular case Vanguard owns 9.33% and BlackRock owns 7.49%. State Street Corp owns 4.20% (Nice)

Institutional shares in total are 71.86% split among 71 different 13F filers, which includes the three listed above.

That means 28.14% are owned by individuals with the largest individual owner being former CEO Craig Jelinek 0.08% of all outstanding shares as of July 19, 2024. He leads with a very very large margin.

So with that in mind, the most likely event was that a large enough number of companies and individuals voted yes, and that some mixture of both also voted no. But I absolutely do concede to your very well made point, you were correct to say, that disproportionately a bunch of rich suits and ties voted for the end of DEI. Especially if they perceived economic incentive to hire literally anybody, prioritizing high efficiency able bodied and minded people, over specifying a diverse team. I do not agree with that sort of business philosophy but I have to acknowledge their reasoning: a larger pool of workers means lower labor costs.

‘If you raise (the price of the) effing hot dog, I will kill you. Figure it out.’

Be careful you might get banned for promoting violence.

What is the value of shareholders for massive corporations?

Corporations don’t start off massive. They start off small and lacking “capital” or money with which to fund the creation and support of their products before they become profitable and self-sustaining. So, how do they motivate people to lend them money? They sell shares, aka ownership, of the company. If the company succeeds, the shares become more valuable and the shareholder that bought them can sell them for more than they initially paid. Mostly, massive corporations don’t need to raise money in this way of selling shares, so most shares are traded publicly through third parties.

Is it that they fund retirements of future generations?

Kind of. Retirement is expensive, and saving alone isn’t really enough to pay for it. On the whole, stocks tend to go up, so people mostly invest their savings into the stock market for years before they retire so that their money will grow enough to retire. Individually, people are usually trying to find their own retirements, not future generations. However, there do exist big retirement funds for entire companies called pensions that are interested in growing a pool of money for its current employees and future ones. Vanguard, and similar companies, offer tools to make investing for retirement easier, like accounts that you don’t have to pay taxes on until you retire, or single shares that are actually thousands of different company’s shares grouped into one.

To your last point, there could be better ways, but we don’t currently use them. There are problems with the system for sure.

My brain is exploding at the idea of cheese and jacket being illiterative and I hate it but the sound is so close that I can't really argue.