Also, I would counter that in a firm, the legal and immoral loopholes that would give one party greater wealth would do so 1) at the expense of other parties inside the firm and 2) run the risk of bad optics / PR to institutional investors who look out for things like this when evaluating a firm.
Lastly, the aggregate of these factors is baked into the return on investment of a stock. In other words, I suspect that might be happening in firms that are making alot of money and providing healthy returns for shareholders. Alot less so at firms that are struggling and not providing much growth.
For instance, at the 2016 Alphabet meeting, they voted for Alphabet shareholders having one vote per share and adoption of a majority vote for election of the board. Those are the very core corporate governance oddities that Alphabet is using to allow the founders and Eric Schmidt to have total control of the company and Vanguard voted their shares towards better governance.
Obviously, since Eric Schmidt and the founders have the majority of the votes, these didn't pass, but they voted the way you would have liked and against management.
> Still, these funds retain the power of voice, the ability to exert shareholder influence on management and governance-related proposals. But critics say passively invested funds, with their lower fees, lack the resources and often the will to monitor their large and diverse portfolios. The Economist calls them “lazy investors.”...
> My fellow researchers and I set out to test that claim. In our forthcoming research paper in The Journal of Financial Economics, we show that passive institutions do indeed positively shape firms’ governance policies. Our findings run contrary to the presumption that passive investors lack the willingness and ability to influence firms’ policy choices.
> The results of our analysis suggests that passive investors affect firm governance in several ways. For example, we found that an increase in passive ownership is associated with a statistically significant increase in the share of independent directors on firms’ boards. In addition, firms with higher passive investor ownership were more likely to remove firm takeover defenses (for example, so-called “poison pills” and limitations on shareholders calling special board meetings). They were also less likely to have the unequal voting rights of a dual-class share structure.
[1] https://hbr.org/2016/05/research-index-funds-are-improving-c...