Someone’s buying votes in Disney’s ugly proxy fight

Disney is embroiled in Lion King-level drama: Two hedge funds that each own a chunk of the entertainment behemoth are tangling horns with CEO Bob Iger, pitching competing visions for how to make the company’s stock bounce back.

All three camps are trying to convince Disney shareholders to vote their representatives onto the company’s board at its April 3 annual meeting. The plot thickened this week, when Business Insider reported that a mystery investor offered to buy votes through Shareholder Vote Exchange, a controversial startup that lets shareholders sell their voting rights.

• The unknown investor bid $100,000 for 500,000 votes, electoral power that would cost them over $55 million if they were to purchase the shares themselves at yesterday’s closing price.

Who’s buying votes?
All we know for sure is that it’s a Disney shareholder. It’s unclear whether they are affiliated with the two Iger-bashing activist investors seeking board seats (Blackwells Capital and Nelson Peltz’s Trian Fund Management) or support Iger.

Who’s willing to sell?
Possibly, the thousands of individual investors who the WSJ says collectively own over a third of Disney stock—an unusually high amount for a company. As of yesterday, over 20,000 Disney shareholder votes were offered as available for sale on the Shareholder Vote Exchange.

Buying shareholder votes is technically legal…but it’s likely impractical as a strategy to enact a major leadership overhaul, says Bloomberg’s finance wonk Matt Levine. Still, it could make a difference—Peltz’s 2017 activist fight against Procter & Gamble was decided by just 42,000 votes. Morning Brew