My 11 Google Shares Come With a 0.0000002 Percent Voice

Sunday, April 12, 11:05 in the morning, kitchen table, and a proxy card printed from my brokerage lay next to the orange juice with fourteen proposals on it, each phrased like a riddle written by lawyers billing by the comma. Proposal 6. Proposal 9. Say on pay. I have owned these shares since 2021 and never once voted. Eleven shares of Google, one vote each, and a pen that abruptly felt ceremonial.

Voting was free, took minutes, and changed nothing, which raises the fair question of why my chest got tight about it at all. The answer is the number on the card's last page, approximately 5.9 billion votes outstanding across all share classes. Mine were 11 of them. That is 0.0000002 percent of the loudest silence I have ever financially participated in. I did the division twice, on paper, hoping to be wrong by an order of magnitude. I was not.

The card also introduced me to companies I reckoned I knew, cuz the same business sells two tickers with two different amounts of say, and somewhere between those tickers and a $700,000 Berkshire share I will never own, I worked out who actually casts the votes for the other 99.9 percent of my money. One proposal, number 9, asked about auditing the risks of artificial intelligence, and 96 percent of my fellow owners eventually waved it off. I circled it anyway. We will get there.

two tickers, one company, zero equality

The card's top line settled a confusion I had carried for years. The company sells two tickers, the one I own carries one vote per share, the cheaper sibling trades voteless, and somewhere upstairs the founders hold a third class the public never sees, ten votes apiece, a stack that keeps their control north of 50 percent no matter what my eleven does. My votes are real. They are also a rounding error's rounding error. I dug into the footnote twice to make sure the word billion was not a typo. It was not.

the $700,000 share with one ordinary vote

My uncle Walt, who has opinions the way other men have shoes, spent a 2022 barbecue explaining that real owners buy the Berkshire A shares, $700,000 and change each, one vote per share, no super-voting class, no voteless sibling, a structure so flat it looks almost naive beside Google's architecture. I will never hold one. Neither will he. A company that prices its ballot inside a house down payment hands every buyer the same sized vote, while a company I can actually afford gives me a voice of 0.0000002 percent and calls both things ownership. The dictionary does not care. The difference is still worth understanding.

what proposal 9 actually asked

Proposal 9 wanted an annual report on how the company audits, tests, and discloses the risks built into its artificial intelligence systems, four pages of reasoning attached, while the board's recommendation against it ran one dense paragraph. I voted for it. Not because four pages will discipline a company this size, but cuz the card was sitting there and the pen was already uncapped, and when the count came back after the May 1 meeting, 96 percent of voters had sided with the paragraph. My rebellion weighed eleven votes. The paragraph won.

my 11 votes, itemized for ten minutes

The rest of the card took ten minutes flat. Say on pay, hold. Two auditor ratifications, for. Three shareholder proposals about clawbacks and sustainability reports, split down lines I could defend at a dinner party but could not defend as meaningful, since none of it moves a number anywhere. Voting cost nothing but attention, and attention is the one asset I spend more carefully every year. I initialed the bottom, sealed the envelope, and felt absurdly official, a man voting on the direction of a ship from a canoe.

my index fund votes for me 9,000 times a year

The card also exposed who honestly votes my money, because the largest slice of my portfolio is not the 11 shares at all, it is an index fund holding stakes in approximately 9,000 companies whose proxies get cast every year by the fund's stewardship team under a policy I have never once read. My ETF offers a pass-thru platform where I could, in theory, mirror my 11-vote ego trip across thousands of holdings. I poked at the platform for an evening. Then I closed it. The fund votes with management about 90 percent of the time, a sentence that should bother me more than it does, and the alternative, reading thousands of proxy cards myself, is a cure with worse side effects than the disease.

the stamp on the envelope cost 78 cents

Mailing the card cost 78 cents, which means the postage was, conservatively, several hundred million times more valuable than the vote it carried. I have started saying this at parties. It clears a room at a predictable rate. But the arithmetic points somewhere useful if you let it: influence per dollar is miserable when you own the vote directly and quietly excellent when you own the whole fund, cuz a stewardship team voting my shares across 9,000 boardrooms is the closest thing a person of my size gets to a seat at any table at all.

the same table, a marked card and warm juice

Sunday, April 19, the same kitchen table, orange juice gone warm beside an empty envelope, and the confirmation on my screen said my votes were recorded at 10:52 in the morning, eleven shares, fourteen proposals, one rebellion on proposal 9, filed by a man whose entire voting power is smaller than the rounding on his grocery receipt. The card taught me the architecture. The stamp priced my influence. The index fund carries the real weight of my money's voice while I sleep, and next April I will do the whole ritual again for eleven votes and 78 cents of postage, and I will feel exactly this absurd about it. Some ceremonies are worth their price in juice.