You're right, but to be fair, you can have such a conflict of interest within privately held companies as well, where it would be well outside the scope of the

You're right, but to be fair, you can have such a conflict of interest within privately held companies as well, where it would be well outside the scope of the SEC and entirely at the risk of private investors. Also, in some very notable examples of public companies where executives hold too large of a share of equity (primary example: Mark Zuckerberg and Facebook), public shareholders are unable to hold management accountable for decisions which public shareholders consider to be against their interests. So either one or both are true: such a scenario is better handled by corporate boards, and/or the SEC needs more teeth to prevent the consolidation of ownership / control of public companies.