Sometimes it's interesting to look at chain of ownership/control/leverage. When you do this for almost any organization in the US you always end up back at one of two places. Either Vanguard or Blackrock, or more likely both.

But does the chain terminate there? Who controls Vanguard and or who has leverage over them? In most organizations that's your board of directors and beyond them actual major shareholders which are often the same thing. Long story short is with rare exceptions whoever owns the most has the most long term leverage over what an organization does.

I could go into some math that shows that whoever owns the most ends up with disproportionate control and so being a top owner, even if still a minority against the whole, basically means you get to direct other people's money. If they don't like your particular projection of power over management they can always sell their shares and move on. So the remaining ownership of a company also has a bias toward people who are pretty ok with that person's pressure.

The quick version of the math is that if you owned 10% of a company and there were a thousand other investors equally owning the rest for most permutations of votes you can decide the outcome of most of them. On the other extreme if you own 51% of a company you have 100% of control. Then without going into it between those two extremes control usually exceeds ownership.

So that's really to say that the top shareholder really controls the firm... with extra steps.

So since this kind of analysis 90% of the time takes you to either Vanguard or Blackrock it might be interesting to know who owns them.

Well you come across some interesting non-information when you try to research Vanguard. Who are the shareholders in the obvious question. The response you get from any query is that "Vanguard has a unique structure where the company is owned by it's funds. [So the funds are the shareholders, nice]. And the funds are owned by the shareholders. And so Vanguard is owned by it's shareholders." No fucking duh. But if you try to understand who the shareholders are... it's the funds.. is the only immediate information.

I'm sure there is a correct answer to the real question, and I'm sure this is an accurate description of their shareholder model. But it seems somewhat deliberate in obfuscating ownership to have a model that's nuanced enough that that seems like a useful and descriptive explanation while conveniently getting zero data out of it.

So I've hit a small roadblock and would rather bring more people in to help figure it out in part because this is interesting enough on its own. It's not available at a quick glance who owns it unlike almost any other organization. That's interesting.

Like if I tried to research who owns Microsoft in theory I could get back an explanation of how individuals and orgs exchange shares in an open market to determine who owns the company. But that would be silly because it would just be a description of how a standard corporate shareholder model works on a publicly traded company. No. The correct answer to who owns Microsoft is obviously a pie chart of who mother fuckn' owns Microsoft. So by running even a slightly nuanced model we get to pretend a shallow explanation of their model is a real answer.

But I have interpretations of what this shallow description might mean. Of course only one can be right and someone who knows can tell us which one.

Possibility 1: Maybe this is describing a customer owned model that is just being unclear. In which case likely the biggest single customer/owner is a government pension.

Possibility 2: Maybe someone else besides me figured out the OPM->control model (other people's money) but realized to be the largest fish in the pond that doesn't have someone owning you in a controlling way, needs a different structure at its terminus than the standard shareholder model. So John Bogle (founder) created a structure that would do exactly that. Ownership with no control leaving control purely in management's hands (himself).

Possibility 3: There is a set of controlling investors besides John Bogle but the structure obscures it. Maybe lizard people.

Possibility 4: Once unwrapped the answer is just Blackrock.

So who do you think it is? Is it the Government, Blackrock, Lizard people, a nameless super investor, a shadow world government, or John B himself?

Vote now.