Why Insider Ownership Can Beat Market-Cap Investing With Haren Bhakta of Insider Ownership Index

Haren Bhakta is the Founder and CEO of Inside Ownership Index, the company behind the Inside Ownership 100 (IO 100). He has more than two decades of experience in financial markets and portfolio construction and developed the index around the idea that executive ownership can better align leadership with shareholders. Earlier in his career, he worked at Merrill Lynch and Morgan Stanley before serving as Managing Member and Investment Adviser Representative at HSB Capital Advisors. A CFA charterholder, Haren focuses on ownership-aligned investing, accountability, and the role of “skin in the game” in long-term value creation.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[1:43] How Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway sparked the Inside Ownership 100 idea
[4:55] Why Nassim Nicholas Taleb’s Skin in the Game shaped Haren Bhakta’s investment philosophy
[8:00] The difference between insider-ownership weighting and traditional market-cap weighting
[12:18] How owner-operators can make contrarian decisions and protect long-term company culture
[14:13] Why a small number of extreme winners drive stock-market wealth creation
[19:13] The quarterly rebalance schedule and why leadership departures can matter more than insider selling
[25:24] How declining founder ownership can signal culture erosion and portfolio trimming
[28:05] The natural investor for an ownership-based passive index strategy

In this episode…

Equity investing often emphasizes company size, earnings, and valuation while paying less attention to the personal ownership stakes of corporate leaders. Significant insider ownership can reshape incentives by tying executives’ financial outcomes more closely to long-term shareholder value. Could weighting companies by leadership ownership help investors capture more of the market’s biggest long-term winners?

According to Haren Bhakta, who founded the Inside Ownership100 Index, ownership provides a practical way to measure alignment between corporate leaders and shareholders. His Inside Ownership 100 methodology begins with S&P 500 companies, ranks them according to the dollar value of insider-held shares, and gives greater weight to businesses where leaders have meaningful financial stakes. Haren argues that owner-operators are more likely to think long term, protect company culture, accept short-term tradeoffs, and pursue unconventional ideas because their own wealth rises or falls alongside shareholders.

On this episode of Top Business Leaders Show, Chad Franzen welcomes Haren Bhakta, Founder and CEO of Inside Ownership Index, for a conversation about insider ownership, founder-led companies, and the “skin in the game” philosophy behind the Inside Ownership 100. Haren explains how the index differs from the S&P 500, why ownership can shape incentives and culture, how leadership changes affect rebalancing, and why he sees ownership concentration as a governance risk.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

Quotable Moments

“When leaders own meaningful stakes in the companies they run, they treat the companies better. They treat shareholders better.”
“When you have something on the line, your mind operates differently than when you have nothing on the line.”
“You need a CEO with significant skin in the game to do things that may not make sense to most people.”
“Index returns come from a small number of extreme winners, and a small number of individuals create enormous wealth.”
“By regularly participating and knowing what you own, you’re more likely to stick to your strategy over the long term.”

Action Steps

Evaluate insider ownership when researching companies: Look beyond market capitalization and consider whether executives and board members have meaningful personal capital invested alongside shareholders.
Examine how leadership incentives affect decision-making: Consider whether executives benefit primarily from short-term bonuses or have substantial ownership encouraging long-term value creation.
Monitor major leadership transitions: Pay attention when influential founders, CEOs, or owner-operators retire, leave the board, or materially reduce their ownership stakes.
Look for cultures built around long-term ownership: Study whether leaders have the freedom and financial alignment to make unconventional decisions that may sacrifice near-term results for lasting value.
Know what you own and remain engaged: Understand the people behind your investments and the reasons you hold them to reduce the temptation to react emotionally to short-term market movements.

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Episode Transcript

Intro: 00:04

Welcome to the Top Business Leaders Show. Powered by Rise25 media, we feature top founders, executives, and business leaders from all over the world.

Chad Franzen: 00:20

Hi, Chad Franzen here, co-host of the Top Business Leaders Show, where we feature CEOs, entrepreneurs, and top leaders in the business world. This episode is brought to you by Rise25. We help B2B businesses reach their dream relationships and connect with more clients, referrals, and strategic partnerships and get ROI done through done-for-you podcasts. If you have a B2B business and want to build great relationships, there’s no better way to profile the people and companies you admire than on your own podcast. To learn more, go to rise25.com or email us at support@rise 25.com.

My guest today is Haren Bhakta, founder and CEO of Inside Ownership Index. Haren has more than two decades of experience in financial markets and portfolio construction, and developed the Inside Ownership 100 index, which selects and weights companies based on the value of shares owned by insiders. Earlier in his career, he worked at Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Securities, and he later served as managing member and investment adviser representative at HSB Capital Advisors. He is a chartered financial analyst and is also CEO and investment advisor representative at I O advisors. Hey, Haren, thanks so much for joining me today.

How are you?

Haren Bhakta: 01:32

Hey. Good. How’s it going?

Chad Franzen: 01:34

Good, thanks. So tell me a little bit more about inside ownership and kind of what led you to starting that?

Haren Bhakta: 01:43

Yeah. Well, for starters, I’ve been in the investment industry for a long time, and at some point, I fell in love with Warren Buffett and his teachings. And I started attending the Berkshire annual meetings in Omaha every year since 2017. So I invested a lot of money in Berkshire Hathaway for myself and for my clients. And in 2024, I actually thought of the idea of the index while sitting in the meeting.

And this was the first meeting where Charlie Munger had passed away. So he wasn’t there. So it was this kind of like in the back of my mind, what am I going to do with Berkshire shares when Warren Buffett passes away? I don’t think of the company’s future prospects in the same way without Warren Buffett. And so halfway through the meeting, it actually hit me that the S&P 500 will actually be buying more Berkshire Hathaway when Warren Buffett dies.

A lot of people don’t know that the S&P 500 does this calculation where they exclude his shares, they exclude controlling shareholders when they calculate the size of each company. And I just thought, okay, well, this is the opposite of what I would want. And probably any other investor, we own Berkshire Hathaway because of that belief and trust in Warren Buffett. So who would want more Berkshire Hathaway without him? We should want more with him.

And with the same respect, Tesla. Who would want more Tesla without Elon Musk? Who would want more meta without Mark Zuckerberg? So I created the index in order to invest more so in these genius CEOs and, you know, move on from these companies. Once these CEOs are gone and invest in other high ownership companies where the leaders own meaningful stakes in the companies they run.

Chad Franzen: 03:43

So tell me a little bit about how the index works. Then I mentioned that it selects and weights companies based on the value of shares owned by insiders. Can you kind of expand on that?

Haren Bhakta: 03:53

Yeah, sure. So we start with the S&P 500 as a starting universe. So we look at the 500 companies within the S&P 500, and then take the top 100 from there based on the dollar value of ownership by the leaders of the organization. And the idea behind that is, is when leaders own meaningful stakes in the companies they run, they treat the companies better. They treat shareholders better.

They are more long term oriented. They’re not trying to hit quarterly metrics or bonuses. What they care about is long term value and value creation. So by investing in these high ownership companies, you end up with a more robust, more robust portfolio, more shareholder aligned. And yeah, and in general, over a long period of time, they tend to perform better.

Chad Franzen: 04:48

I saw Skin in The Game. Nicholas Talib’s Skin in The Game. I’m sorry Nicholas.

Haren Bhakta: 04:55

I read Skin in The Game literally seven times. I’m quite obsessed with that book. And I thought of the idea of the skin in the game index, which is essentially a skin in the game index by basically reading the book and you know it. That’s probably how it hit me. You know, how skin in the game is incredibly important in decision making.

And, you know, like he says, I’m a person who has two minds. One, when their skin is in the game, one when there’s none. And I’m typically dumb when I don’t have skin in the game. He writes that in the book, and I think most people operate that way. When you have something on the line, your mind operates differently.

And when you have nothing on the line, you know, most people are dumb.

Chad Franzen: 05:46

What does the phrase skin in the game mean for the practical investor?

Haren Bhakta: 05:52

Skin in the game means that you have something on the line. You know you have something to lose and you’re going to operate, you know, with much more integrity, much more passion, much more motivation when you have something to lose. And that’s what you want in CEOs that they have something to lose if they’re wrong. And there’re countless examples of where CEOs do not have skin in the game and, you know, it ends in catastrophe. So I’ll give you a prime example.

2023 Silicon Valley Bank went to zero. Now it’s actually pretty rare for a company to go to zero while in the S&P 500. But usually the S & P will kick them out. But with Silicon Valley Bank, it happens so fast that it was in the index when it went to zero. So if you owned S&P you had exposure to Silicon Valley Bank.

But if I looked at the proxy filing in 2023, the year it went bankrupt, and the ownership amongst the insiders was so low that it was represented by an asterisk. So this is what happens when you have CEOs and leaders who own nothing of the organization. What they aim for is hitting the ball out of the park and aiming for bonuses. So they lever up the company, take chances that they otherwise would not have if they own a meaningful stake. And you know some when they’re wrong, it goes to zero.

And in that case, that’s what happened. So what you want is meaningful ownership. Of companies that you invest in by the leaders. So imagine, you know, investing in companies where leaders own nothing. You know, what they’re motivated by is not creating value.

They’re, they’re motivated by short term metrics hitting quarterly numbers and, and getting large bonuses, but not creating sustainable value.

Chad Franzen: 07:51

What, how, how does the inside ownership 100 index differ from a traditional market cap weighted index like S&P 500?

Haren Bhakta: 08:00

Yeah. Well, the S&P 500 chooses a 500 companies based on its size, and they proportionally invest in each company based on that size. So, you know, quick and simple math is like if if company A is $100 million or let’s say $100 billion and company B is $50 billion, well, they’ll invest twice as much in, in company A who’s twice as big by index on alternatively, will invest based on how much the leaders of the organization own. So let’s say that same company, a leader owns, let’s say 1% of the company. And so that would be $1 billion.

And in company B, You know, leaders own 10% of the company. So that’s $5 billion. So we, you know, we would be invested significantly more in company B simply because a leader owns a more significant stake and therefore treats the company probably better and are more motivated and probably more successful because the leaders of the organization own so much more. They’re obviously more successful. You know, so what we want to do is wait for portfolios and index to leaders rather than the corporations themselves.

So I like to ask people a hypothetical question or a thought experiment actually. Imagine a very successful company run by very successful leaders and overnight, let’s change that, that the leaders of that organization go to brand new people. Now, would you think of that company the same or is it the same company? And, and most people would say no, but the S and P treats that company exactly the same. Whether, you know, it doesn’t matter who runs the company.

We would look at the company entirely differently because we’re using ownership. And, you know, we can’t just interchangeably change our people and expect the company to be the same.

Chad Franzen: 10:04

I saw that you’ve chosen to cap insider shares at 5% in the index calculation. Why is that?

Haren Bhakta: 10:11

Yeah. So we capped the ownership basically to add a skin in the game filter to S&P and remove companies that do not have skin in the game. So the idea is to avoid companies. So by adding that 5% filter or limit, I should say we don’t want to end up with a portfolio of just like, you know, couple stocks where, for example, Larry Ellison owns 40% of Oracle and Michael Dell owns 45% of Dell. We don’t want to end up with, you know, too much concentration.

So by limiting it to 5%, what we’re doing is we’re essentially avoiding companies where there is no skin in the game. And I went back, I went back to the biggest value destroyers over the last five years. And if you look at the biggest value destroyers, what they all shared in common was no ownership. So the number one value destroyer within the S&P 500 was PayPal. You know, Elon Musk and all the owners, the founders are gone.

So there’s no ownership left. Number two was Disney. Again no ownership at the board level or executive level. And then I think number three was Comcast. Number four.

Nike’s in there somewhere. And you know Phil Knight is gone. So again you know you have a world class brand of Nike that is down 70% over the last five years. We’re talking about the biggest bull market in stock market history and a world class brand. Nike is down 70% during that time frame.

It’s no coincidence that Phil Knight is gone, and this is what happens. It’s almost a rule when those responsible for the success of an organization leave the. The brand and culture erodes. And in Nike’s case it is clear.

Chad Franzen: 12:05

Yeah. I was just going to ask you that. What effect do you think it has on the culture or, or anything that happens inside the company when the biggest decision makers have a significant portion of their own wealth at risk?

Haren Bhakta: 12:18

Well, it’s like Jeff Bezos said, he said that if you want to be successful, you have to be able to do things that don’t make sense to most people. Now imagine a CEO who wants to do things that don’t make sense to, you know, committees and boards. They don’t have the luxury of doing things that do not make sense. So you need a CEO with significant skin in the game to do things that may not make sense to most people, but can be proven right over time. And you want to do things as well that create significant value, have to do things at the company level too, so that may not or may make the company look worse in the near term.

For example, charging lower prices. So Amazon, Walmart, Costco, these types of companies thrive by offering lower prices and thin margins and rewarding the customer for shopping there. So, you know, if you have a CEO who’s rewarded for quarterly bonuses will be incentivized to charge higher prices and, you know, get rewarded with larger bonuses. So eventually all retailers fail, right? All retailers get succeeded by, you know, the next one.

So all the advantages Sears had of maintaining the dominance that they had, yet they got replaced by Walmart and Sam Walton. Right. And so this is what happens to every single retailer, because eventually the cultures erode and someone else that can offer lower prices comes along and eats their lunch.

Chad Franzen: 13:58

I saw that your research says the index methodology generated about two percentage points of annual alpha versus the S&P 500 and historical testing. What do you think that is? What do you think explains that difference?

Haren Bhakta: 14:13

Yeah. Well so here’s a University of Arizona State professor who did research on all US stocks over the course of 100 years, a century of data. What he discovered was that 4% of all stocks delivered all the wealth creation during that hundred years. Nine the other 96% matched US Treasury bills. That’s incredible.

This is why it’s so hard to pick stocks for most individuals, right? So the index returns come from a small number of extreme winners. And what academia got half right is, you know, yes, it’s power law driven, but individuals are even larger power law driven as you know, a few small numbers of individuals create enormous wealth and change the world. And by indexing these leaders, we essentially invest more in these leaders and move on to the next leaders when they come along. And so I, you know, we’re getting more exposure to essentially the best companies, the, the, the big outliers.

[continue to page 2]

So I looked at what’s called a hundred bagger. A hundred bagger is a stock that went up 100 times your initial investment. So $10,000 turns into a million, right? I looked at all hundred baggers over the last 25 years from 2000 to 2025, there were about 21. I could find 21 companies that turned $10,000 into a million.

But we have Monster Beverage, Netflix, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, Apple, O’Reilly’s, you know, the auto parts retailer. Universal insurance track, tractor supply. So, you know, they’re all across the board in terms of industry, but they only shared one thing in common. They all, or at least 19 of the 21 had starting ownership. When I say starting ownership, I mean before it went on that that hundred bagger journey, what did it look like prior?

And they all had ownership above 5%, at least 5%. And two exceptions were Apple and Fico. Isaac. So those two exceptions didn’t have the starting ownership. Surprisingly, Apple.

Steve Jobs didn’t have an enormous amount of Apple. You know, and you know, it’s because he got kicked out early on or not early on, but he got kicked out at some point and came back. So Apple Steve, Steve Jobs didn’t have that large ownership that you would expect a founder to have. So those two exceptions earn high returns on your investment without having that ownership. But 19 of the 21 all had it.

And it’s because you need that founder mentality to have those huge outlier returns or not founder, but owner operator, because you need that culture to, to have extreme outlier returns and you have to do things that are different. And it’s too hard to do things that are different when there’s no one at the leadership level with ownership because you can’t innovate by committee. And you know, that’s the key trait in innovation, and a guy named Matt Ridley wrote a book, How Innovation Works. And, you know, he wrote a lot about how companies innovate. And it’s not through committee.

It’s through trial and error and through short feedback loops. You need people making the decisions, experiencing the rapid feedback loops and trial and error. And when you have committees that those working directly on the problem do not have the decision making to, to pivot and make changes to the product or, or whatever it is they’re working on. You don’t get that when, when you have committees and boardrooms and discussions at the top level, you need people directly working on the problem. And these founders are very often the ones who created the product in the first place.

So they understand it on a very deep level. And what it’s called is tacit knowledge. Tacit knowledge is implicit knowledge. This knowledge you can’t, you know, teach someone else. It’s ingrained in their bones.

And you don’t get that between hired managers, you know, you can’t hire the best CEOs in the world.

Chad Franzen: 18:57

Sure. I saw that the Inside ownership 100 index rebalances in or it’s scheduled to rebalance in March, June, September and December. So quarterly. Why is that? And maybe what can change, you know, between each rebalance?

Haren Bhakta: 19:13

Well, we wanted to follow the S&P 500 rebalance schedule. The S&P S&P is actually the calculation agent of the inside ownership index. So they calculate and publish the returns. I. I chose S&P because for one you know we’re using the starting universe.

And you know I just thought it’s incredibly credible to have the S&P be the one to publish the results of the index. So I partnered with the S and P on this index. And so we chose the rebalance schedule that they use for S and P 500. And there are other indexes. What can happen is you know a lot of people think that it has to do with insider buying or selling, but that’s not actually the case.

You know, Jeff Bezos, for example, has been selling Amazon for 20 years. Jensen has been selling Nvidia for 20 years. What it is is these CEOs have enormous amounts of wealth tied up into these companies. And that’s what you want in your CEO. So when they’re selling, it’s not like they’re selling because they’re bearish.

They’re selling simply taking liquidity off the top because they own so much of it. So we’re not concerned about the sale. What we’re concerned about is the dollar value of their ownership. And what changes that we see quarter to quarter are not from the selling or buying. It’s from dying or retiring.

So, you know, for example, as I mentioned, Warren Buffett, you know, when he dies, his shares will become free floating and the S&P will be buying more. We’ll be out because he’s no longer part of the organization. Reed Hastings recently retired from the board of Netflix. So now we’re significantly underweight Netflix or you know, and Fedex, for example. We’re out of Fedex because the founder, Fred Smith, died recently.

So he’s no longer part of, of the ownership of, Fedex. And so it has to do more with the retirement or, or the dying of these leaders. And I went back 100 years. I went back 100 years and looked at the number one company in the world and what it looked like. And you know, what happened to that company and how it left the top ten.

So I went back to the 1930s. We could look at the biggest company in the world , GM and General Motors. It was run and it was the biggest company again 20 years later. So for two decades, it was the biggest company in the world from 1930 to 1950. Beyond 1950, and it was run by one man, Alfred Sloan.

Alfred Sloan ran GM as CEO for more than two decades. And when he left, GM left the top ten and never returned. And then again, the biggest company in the world in the 1980s, 1970s to 1984 or beyond, 1984 was IBM. IBM was so dominant in 1984 that it was more than two and a half times larger than the next largest company in the world. So this would be like Nvidia today being $12 trillion.

It was incredibly dominant. No, no company has been as dominant since. But in 1984, the CEO or not CEO, the chairman, was Thomas Watson Jr, the founder of the sun. He’s the one that took IBM public in the 50s, ran as CEO until the 70s and remained as chairman until 1984. So he retired in 1984.

And fast forward just eight years after his retirement. IBM is now in the top ten. So we’re talking about the most dominant company to ever exist. Two and a half times larger than the next largest company leaves the top ten just eight years after his retirement. And today, IBM is not even in the top 25.

So this is what happens when those responsible for the success of an organization leave the company’s change and the road. And then again. Yeah. And then again, General Electric in, in, in, in 2001. The biggest company in the world was General Electric.

You know, Jack Welch leaving GE will probably never return to the top ten again. You know it’s completely gone. It’s broken up into three different companies. And you know nowhere near the size or success of you know, it had. So again, when those responsible for the success leave the companies erode.

This is why today the S and P five, or I should say the, the ten largest companies in the US, if you include OpenAI and anthropic and then you have, you know, Nvidia, Amazon, Google, Apple, they’re all founded on average in the year 2000, 2000 or, or, you know, so it’s young companies that that create enormous wealth. And if you look at Europe, the average company in the top ten was founded in the 1940s. So.

Chad Franzen: 24:33

Oh yeah.

Haren Bhakta: 24:33

You know it. It’s no coincidence that these enormous companies were founded more recently with, with, with founders or, you know, high ownership, even the largest company, the largest money manager in the world. All the advantages legacy companies have to become the biggest money managers in the world. Yet it’s a company called BlackRock with a CEO who founded the company still today, Larry Fink. You know, you know, it could have been any other company yet.

Yet it’s a new company, a newer company with a founder still alive that takes that status as the biggest money manager in the world.

Chad Franzen: 25:13

So, when you see a founder kind of just gradually selling down his or her ownership position, what does your methodology tell investors?

Haren Bhakta: 25:24

Well, if it’s still above 5%, we’re still going to be overweight. That position. And when they start selling well beyond that and it starts going down below 5% ownership, that’s when we begin selling and trimming the position. And, you know, we’re not going to be out until their ownership is is significantly lower, you know, so it would take significant selling for us to be out what what we want is, and it’s not a fast moving index, but we’re more concerned about is culture erosion slow, slow, you know, painful decays in companies with, with what you see, like, you know, Boeing, Intel, you know, another example is Intel. Andy Grove as CEO, if you invested $10,000 when he became CEO in the 70s, $10,000 would be several million by the time you retire in 1998.

He retired in 1998, left the board entirely, and 1998. Till today, 27, 26 years, 27, 28 years, you know, zero growth in stock, right? So, you know, this is what happens when these people responsible for the success of leaving are not from the same company, especially in high tech. You know, the only exception is Apple. Apple is the only company I could find that has remained great with, you know, where the guy responsible leaves.

It’s the exception. You know, for the most part, most companies begin erosion. But what I do find is a very successful leader can find a successful leader, but a replacement. But that replacement cannot find its replacement, you know, so it is after three generations, you see the companies you. That’s why, you know, the top ten companies in the US are all all founded in at least my lifetime, you know, or except for Berkshire Hathaway, which, you know, technically is a 200 year old company.

But, you know, Warren Buffett is technically the founder of modern day Berkshire, right? Because it has none of the same companies that existed when he bought it.

Chad Franzen: 27:56

So what would you describe as a natural investor for an insider ownership strategy?

Haren Bhakta: 28:05

Well, as Warren Buffett says, the Know Nothing investor could outperform most investment professionals by regularly investing in a passive index fund. So we are for those who acknowledge that, you know, they’re not going to beat the market by picking their own stocks, right? What we created is a better index fund by investing in owners, individuals who own significant stakes in the companies they run. So we are for the average investor who needs to invest in the stock market and get broad exposure, but doesn’t know how to pick stocks themselves and understands that they’re going to do better investing in a passive index fund. And we created an index fund where people probably have a more attachment to because they can name the individual.

So every month, as part of my newsletter, I email the top ten positions in the S&P 500 and the inside Ownership 100, and name the single largest owner within each organization and you will recognize the names in the inside ownership 100, right. You will recognize Jeff Bezos. You’ll recognize Jensen or Elon Musk in Warren Buffett. If you look at the top ten in the S&P 500. This is like half the names you’re not going to recognize.

Can you name someone at Eli Lilly? Can you name someone at ExxonMobil, which was in the top ten at the last rebalance? Can you name the you know the highest owner at even Broadcom. You know, most people can’t name that person right. But you can name Michael Dell.

You can name Larry Ellison Oracle you can name you know like I mentioned Jeff Bezos or Jensen or Warren Buffett. Right. So I, I believe that by well, for one, subscribing to my newsletter where you could get this update every month, you know, you could have more attachment. And therefore, if you have more attachment, you will be less likely to make dumb mistakes. Most people sell at the wrong times and buy at the wrong times.

But by regularly participating and knowing what you own, you’re more likely to stick to your strategy over the long term and therefore do better.

Chad Franzen: 30:45

Yeah, this is all very interesting and kind of eye opening, at least for me. I have one more question for you, but tell me how people can find out more about the Insight Ownership 100 index.

Haren Bhakta: 30:54

Yeah. So I have a really easy website insideownership.com, inside ownership.com. They can subscribe to that monthly newsletter where I email the top ten names. They could find me on LinkedIn. They can get a hold of me that way.

So I’m very easy to find.

Chad Franzen: 31:11

Okay. Sounds good. So last question for you. If the inside ownership idea works the way you envision, what would you like? What would you like it to change about how investors judge corporate leadership?

Haren Bhakta: 31:24

Well, for one, I see a huge systemic problem taking place. Well, corporate America is now controlled by three shareholders, you know, BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street. And it’s creating this huge systemic problem where these, you know, hundreds of billions of dollars of companies could be run by corporate leaders who own nothing. And in the past, that was the case as well. But, you know, shareholders collectively could vote them out if they did a terrible job.

Today it’s not possible for shareholders to benefit shareholders, actual owners of these companies, to vote out leadership because it’s controlled by these three shareholders who really don’t own the shares themselves. They’re these ETFs that they have. And if you know, I’m trying to change that in, in, you know, by, by using ownership, we’re proportionally rewarding companies that have ownership at the leadership level. When you invest in S&P 500, you know, they don’t care who owns the company and you’re automatically buying stock in these companies where leadership doesn’t own anything. And, you know, eventually there’s going to be a huge problem when all shareholders combined do not own more than these passive these three shareholders.

Currently they’re the largest shareholders. But all shareholders combined for most companies outweigh them. But eventually there’s going to be as they take market share. You know, eventually all shareholders combined won’t own more than these three shareholders. And that’s a scary world where three shareholders really control everything.

It’s almost like socialism or, or communism where, where I lead, you know, control is at, at, you know, between three large organizations. It’s not distributed. And what you want is ownership to be distributed and controlled by the public who can make the, you know, vote out bad leadership or, you know, things that they don’t believe in. But when it’s controlled by a centralized top, you see these big systemic problems happen and that gets complicated. But, you know, I hope to change that.

Chad Franzen: 33:51

Sure. Well, hey, thanks so much for your time and sharing all your insights with me. We’ve been talking with Haren Bhakta, founder of Inside Ownership Index. Thanks so much.

Haren Bhakta: 34:02

Yeah. Thank you for having me.

Chad Franzen: 34:03

So long everybody.

Outro: 34:04

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