Rick Alexander: On the Rise of PBCs in the AI Industry and Firm-Specific vs. Diversified Investor Duties

(0:00) Intro. (1:33) About the podcast sponsor: The American College of Governance Counsel (2:20) Start of interview. *Reference to prior episode with Rick (E14 from Aug 2020) (3:32) Update on Public Benefit Corporations (PBCs) from prior episode (2020) (6:00) Surge of VC investments in PBCs driven by AI startups. *Reference to E159 with David Berger on Anthropic's structure (9:48) The OpenAI Controversy (conversion from non-profit to PBC) (13:25) On Dual-Class Share Structures in tech companies (17:10) On Danone and BP as examples of shareholder activism from hedge funds. (18:57) On "Stay private vs Go Public" debate. *Reference to E157 with Tom Callahan, CEO of Nasdaq Private Market (27:17) On the current ESG/DEI backlash ("I think it's an anti-shareholder backlash") (30:52) On the current backlash against Delaware as the favored corporate home (35:26) The McRitchie v. Zuckerberg Case (firm-specific vs diversified equity investors' fiduciary duties) (46:54) On the concentration of power by institutional investors *Reference to E118 with John Coates, from Harvard Law School. Reference to Freshfield's report A Legal Framework for Impact (2021)  (52:03) Looking Forward: US boards under the EU Directive on Corporate Sustainability Due Diligence. Rick Alexander is the CEO of Shareholder Commons. He is also a leading expert in public benefit corporations. You can follow Evan on social media at: X: @evanepstein LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/epsteinevan/  Substack: https://evanepstein.substack.com/ __ To support this podcast you can join as a subscriber of the Boardroom Governance Newsletter at https://evanepstein.substack.com/ __ Music/Soundtrack (found via Free Music Archive): Seeing The Future by Dexter Britain is licensed under a Attribution-Noncommercial-Share Alike 3.0 United States License