As a practical matter, voting rights are, by and large, pretty worthless. Even famous activist investors with very deep pockets (Carl Icahn, for instance) are u

As a practical matter, voting rights are, by and large, pretty worthless. Even famous activist investors with very deep pockets (Carl Icahn, for instance) are usually limited to causing just enough trouble to get management to make some "go away" changes. Plus, management works hard to put in place measures to entrench themselves: anti-takeover defenses, requiring super-majorities for certain changes (often mergers and buyouts), etc. A lot of these moves were undertaken by management of companies in the 1980s in response to a wave of so-called "hostile takeovers" in the 70s and 80s. An interesting example is Alphabet/Google. Their class C shares (which have no votes) are trading at $691 right now. Class A shares (which have one vote) are trading at $705, which is 2% higher. That seems like a small difference, considering you're giving up any kind of voting rights. What if management starts to perform poorly? Well, guess what? Insiders (and only insiders) have class B, which have 10 votes each, so you're not going to have much luck as an activist shareholder mounting a fight against that.