I cannot with the NYT article Why Jeff Bezos' Divorce Should Worry Amazon Investors. And also most of the media's breathless anticipation of a public argument over the divorcing couple's money.
It's not that I don't believe that there could be a bad situation in which a successful businessperson who created a profitable company could lose control of said company and then less business savvy people could take control of the company and run it into the ground with bad decisions. It's just that the (female) ex spouse of the majority shareholder obtaining half of "his" shares is unlikely to be that situation.
A good example is the one used in the NYT article for the company that is allegedly crippled because of its founders' divorce:
Indeed, let's look at the history of those shares since 2014 (not sure why this date is important since the divorce happened in 2010):
Ah yes, the shares have dropped by pretty much half since 2014 and look at that big dip (after a brief continued rise) when Mr. Wynn steps down as chief executive. It's clear that this divorce really hurt those shares.
(Papers shuffling, coughs) Oh gosh you guys, I'm sorry. That's the wrong chart: it's the stock prices of the Las Vegas Sands Corp., another company similar to Wynn Resorts. Here we go with the real chart:
There you go, I mean this undoubtedly shows that investors should really, really care about...
(Fidgeting, sweating) Oh em gee, so. You are not going to believe this, because--it's actually pretty funny--but this isn't Wynn Resorts either, it's Melco Resorts & Entertainment, another company in the casino field of business. Just give me one moment to get to the real one here:
I mean you can't argue with that clear drop since 2014, the stock has only gone down since Mr. Wynn left, clearly his lack of influence in the company lead to...
(Brief hyperventilation) Um, ahem, again, so, so sorry, but that last one was actually Caesars Entertainment Corporation. I know what you're thinking, how could I get those last graphs confused when we are clearly looking for the graph of a company whose founders got divorced and split their shares between them. A graph that shows investors, those super-smart intellectuals, the risks of investing in a company affected by divorce. Investors who shouldn't be picking a very diverse assortment of stocks in order to decrease risk. Investors who should be looking critically at a majority shareholder's prenup in case a...woman he marries becomes a major shareholder in her own right with her own...decision making capacity separate from their marriage. That's the sort of thing that's really going to make you the big bucks. I mean, what if women are bad at business, and insist on having a say in the company despite not knowing what they're doing? We all know women love stoking their egos more than they love money. What if they purposefully tank a business out of spite? We all know that women love spite more than money. What if they take all of their shares of a successful company and sell them to an activist investor? We all know women love giving warehouse employees bathroom breaks more than they love money.* Anyway, here's the real graph with a label so you know I'm not lying this time:
And here's a history of the shares that includes 2010, a point from which the stocks have improved, probably because that was peak financial crisis:
It's almost like regulating the banking system is more important to stock prices than whether your founderS are controlling the company as a united married front or separately because one of them (the male one) is abusing employees.
There are more arbitrary ways to come into a large share of a company than getting divorced after supporting your partner through its founding--like receiving an inheritance as the child of wealthy parents, or just being lucky. Most people want to keep making money, and the idea that a divorced woman is some chaotic threat to investment is ridiculous. If (IF) MacKenzie Bezos gets half of Jeff Bezos's shares, she's most likely to do what she's done for the past 25 years--whatever makes her (and therefore investors) the most money.
*I don't really know what an activist investor would be, I assumed this would be it.
