CBS Wants to Get Rid of a Shareholder
Also the Volcker Rule, guns and irony.
CBS v. Redstone.
If you own 79 percent of the stock—or of the voting stock, anyway—of a public company, then it is conventional to say that you control that company. That is a somewhat loose usage. Your control is not immediate or absolute. If you owned 79 percent of the stock of CBS Corp., for instance, you couldn’t just write yourself into every episode of “MacGyver.” There is a chain of command. If you wanted a “MacGyver” role, you could tell the board of directors, and they could tell the chief executive officer, and he could tell the head of programming, and he could tell the show’s executive producers, and they could tell the writers to fit you in somehow. Any of those people could say no, but if they did, the people above them in the hierarchy could fire them.