The people who own a modern company usually don't run it

In 1932, Adolf Berle and Gardiner Means showed that America's largest corporations had split in two: thousands of scattered shareholders technically own the business, while salaried managers actually control it day to day. That gap between ownership and control, they argued, is the real foundation of modern corporate law and much of what goes wrong inside big companies, from executive pay to boardroom capture.

— Adolf Berle & Gardiner Means, The Modern Corporation and Private Property — 1932
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