Buy the Coal Plant to Stop It
Also bribery, banker pay, WAR, gardening leave market structure and centralized NFTs.
Programming note: Money Stuff will be off the rest of the week, back on Monday.
We talked yesterday about Carl Icahn’s plans to mount a proxy fight at McDonald’s Corp. over its treatment of pigs. It is a strange situation. On the one hand, Icahn’s motives seem essentially altruistic and uneconomical: He cares about animal welfare, his daughter worked at the Humane Society and got him involved, he owns only a tiny number of McDonald’s shares and isn’t in it for the money. On the other hand, Icahn is a billionaire and a ruthless corporate raider with a long history of investing millions of dollars in scorched-earth proxy fights and winning them. That combination is unusual.