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Comment by rmeertens | Hacker News Reader

You might think "who is Christopher Hohn, and what is the TCI Fund", but this guy has a history of making money in weird ways. Just before the banking chrisis, in 2007, he managed to force one of the biggest banks of the the Netherlands (ABN Amro) to either be taken over or to be split up. He has a history of suing the boards of companies if he thinks they can be worth more to investors in some way or another.

You can read more about what happened with the ABN Amro bank back in the days in the super thick book "The Pray" (https://www.amazon.com/Perfect-Prey-Wrong-Banking-Industry/d...). I read it last summer and it is surprisingly interesting for a book which follows the board of a big bank...

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> He has a history of suing the boards of companies if he thinks they can be worth more to investors in some way or another.

An activist investor. I'm not sure why that is particularly noteworthy.

Activist investors are individuals with significant power who seek to enrich themselves by making life much worse for large numbers of people, without recourse, election or accountability. They are one of the significant negatives of capitalism that would benefit the rest of us if they were greatly reduced or removed.

Activist investors pressure management to improve. Most activists are funds and are accountable to their investors. The investors and ultimate beneficiaries are institions such as the Public School Employees’ Retirement System.

Activist investors pressure management to deliver more profits to investors. That's a narrow definition of "improvement". Doesn't matter who they represent, robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't make you right.

> Activist investors pressure management to deliver more profits to investors. That's a narrow definition of "improvement".

Except for the fact that there are activist funds that focus on climate change, gun control, animal welfare and corporate governance.

> Doesn't matter who they represet

It does undermine your activist investors significant negative of capitalism thesis.

> robbing Peter to pay Paul doesn't make you right

Nobody is being robbed.

"robbing Peter to pay Paul" is an idiom used to express that causing one person harm to benefit another is not a good thing. When an investor forces a company to lay off staff, merge with another, sell off divisions, etc... (all actions TCI has done) people within those companies get laid off, their jobs change, wages stagnate, etc... and this is purely for a fund's enrichment. For me it doesn't matter if that fund is then donating to charity because I don't think charitable use of a fraction of profits justifies harmful tactics used to raise that money. That'll just have to be a difference of opinion between us.

If you want to move the goalposts from TCI to activist investors that try to improve a company, then that is a different thing as profit is not the primary motive of those changes. There are activist investors who simply do not invest in companies they do not agree with and in other companies try to address issues with how the company runs, pay gaps, tax compliance, workplace conditions, etc... This is actually trying to improve the company and the lives of the employees, at a possible cost to the company and investors, so very different from just trying to improve a company's profits. Ethical capitalism is a bit of an oxymoron but there is definitely an ethical spectrum of actions within capitalism. Not all actions are equal.

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