Key Takeaways
- Amazon shareholders are pushing for at least 5% of the company’s assets to be allocated to bitcoin.
- The proposal notes that bitcoin has outperformed other assets such as corporate bonds in recent years.
A group of Amazon shareholders is demanding that the company allocate at least 5% of its assets to Bitcoin, through a proposal submitted by the National Center for Public Policy Research (NCPPR), a free-market advocacy think tank.
proposal, common Kotzman’s team recommends adding Bitcoin to Amazon’s treasury as an inflation hedge and asset diversification strategy. He cites Bitcoin’s superior performance compared to traditional assets such as corporate bonds, while pointing to existing Bitcoin investments by companies such as MicroStrategi and Tesla.
“MicroStrategi, which holds bitcoin on its balance sheet, had its shares outperform Amazon’s by 537% in the previous year. And they are not alone. Institutional and corporate adoption of bitcoin is becoming commonplace: more public companies like Tesla and Block have added bitcoin to their balance sheets, Amazon’s second and fourth largest institutional shareholders — BlackRock and Fidelity, respectively — are offering their clients a Bitcoin ETF, and the U.S. government could to form a strategic bitcoin reserve 2025,” the letter states.
The proposal calls on Amazon’s board to evaluate whether the allocation of bitcoins in the treasury serves the long-term interests of shareholders.
Amazon has not publicly responded to the proposal, although the company has previously shown interest in blockchain technology, particularly for supply chain management.
The NCPPR proposal is part of a broad institutional movement toward bitcoin adoption. In October, the think tank sent a similar letter to Microsoft urging it to consider investing in Bitcoin.
Microsoft’s board advised shareholders to vote against their proposal, saying they were already considering a “wide array of investable assets,” including Bitcoin.
If Microsoft decides to invest in Bitcoin and the value of the digital asset subsequently increases, the NCPPR warns that it could end up in shareholder litigation.
Microsoft shareholders are scheduled to vote on their proposal to consider bitcoin on December 10.
What happens after the NCPPR shareholder proposal?
Once a shareholder proposal is submitted, Amazon’s board of directors will review it and decide whether to include it in Amazon’s proxy statement for the upcoming annual meeting of shareholders.
If the proposal is added to the proxy statement, shareholders will vote on it at the annual meeting scheduled for April 2025. The outcome of the vote will depend on the number of votes cast for and against the proposal.
Similar to Microsoft, Amazon’s board of directors typically makes a recommendation on how shareholders should vote on each proposal.
Amazon’s largest shareholders include major financial institutions such as Vanguard Group, BlackRock, State Street, Fidelity Management & Research, Geode Capital Management and JPMorgan.
