Happy Sunday, and welcome back to Dry Powder.

In today’s column, some notes on ValueAct Capital, the activist investor who recently acquired a 6.7 percent stake in The New York Times Company. Plus, a look at E.V. manufacturer Rivian’s growing pains, and the real reason, in my estimation, why Elon Musk has hastily liquified $7B worth of Tesla stock in advance of his date in Chancery.

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But the Times has proved famously immune to outside influence. The Ochs-Sulzberger family, which has owned the paper for more than a century, created the template for ironclad control. The family owns only 1.3 percent of the company’s Class A shares, but nearly 95 percent of its Class B shares, allowing them to appoint 70 percent of the New York Times Company board of directors. (The largest Class A shareholders are Vanguard, with 9.5 percent, and BlackRock, with 8.3 percent.) It’s the same sort of stock structure that allows Shari Redstone to control Paramount Global or Mark Zuckerberg to control Meta. I’m not a huge fan of dual class stock structure for this very reason; it’s not good governance and fails to align economics and control. But it has proliferated in recent years and, to a large degree, we have the Sulzbergers to thank for that...