I just don’t feel comfortable building a robot army here, and then being ousted because of some asinine recommendations from ISS and Glass Lewis, who have no f**king clue. I mean those guys are corporate terrorists. Lemme explain the core problem here, so many of the passive funds vote along the lines of what ISS and Glass Lewis recommend. Now, they have made many terrible recommendations in the past that if those recommendations had been followed would have been extremely destructive to the future of the company. Now, If you’ve got passive funds that essentially defer responsibility for the vote to Glass Lewis and ISS, then you can have extremely disastrous consequences for a publicly traded company if too much of the publicly traded company is controlled by index funds. It’s de facto controlled by Glass Lewis and ISS. This is a fundamental problem for corporate governance, because they’re not voting along the lines that are actually good for shareholders. That’s the big issue, I mean, that’s what it comes down to. ISS Glass Lewis corporate terrorism. -Elon Musk, Tesla Q3 shareholder conference call, October 22, 2025
Banks lend him real money based on the fake money
I count that in the sold category. Because they just get more loans to pay off the previous ones, or default and the bank just takes the shares and does it again because what the loaned is less than the share value. All the while avoiding income and capital gains taxes.
It’s why boycotts and cancelling subscriptions actually do work when done in large enough numbers. Their money can disappear very quickly if shareholders get spooked.
It’s also why Tesla isn’t being affected as much now despite Elon pulling the mask off and going full Nazi, resulting in massive sales drops. Years and years of short sellers and complicit media trying to tank the brand, largely funded and promoted by things like entrenched oil interests and competing car brands have trained many shareholders to ignore a lot.
So how is that fake? I can’t do any of those things you mention in the first paragraph.
Getting loans based on assets is not at all the same as selling those assets.
You’re not rich enough where banks know you always have stock available to give them. Where there’s virtually no limit to your stock pool that the bank can just liquidate after the fact. You need to be in the top .1% for that. The fact you’re on lemmy means that’s not a possibility in the slightest.
It is for the rich. That’s why so many don’t care about their traditional salary. That’s why so many went out of their way to advertise they were taking a $1 salary during the recession, or even today. Because their salary is subject to income tax, but loans are not. You can get the same end result of cash in hand by receiving your pay in stock, then taking loans against that stock.