Matt Levine talks about this all the time in his column. These big institutional investors and index fund managers essentially “own the market”, meaning their p

Matt Levine talks about this all the time in his column. These big institutional investors and index fund managers essentially “own the market”, meaning their profit and loss is determined by the entire market’s performance and not particular companies. Some people fear this will decrease competition (because if your biggest investor also is a big investor in your competitor, they might not want you to compete on price as much), but it also leads to big investors sometimes pushing for policies that help society as a whole in places where an investor in a few companies wouldn’t have the same incentive. COVID-19 is an example. An investor in a drug company might want that company to maximize their profit from making a COVID vaccine, but an index fund manager would be willing to sacrifice some profit for a faster vaccine distribution because the benefit to the economy as a whole (and thus their own total profit) would be greater than the lost profit from not maximizing vaccine profits. Climate change is similar. Having index funds and other large fund managers owning the market means their fear of climate change damaging their long term profits is greater than their greed to make profit from one individual company causing environmental damage in pursuit of profit. In some ways it is kinda interesting, since it is a way past the collective action problem that often prevents action on things like climate change. It is also scary, of course, for non-democratic institutions to have so much power.