There are roughly 1.4 Billion eligible voting shares of The Walt Disney Company.
At 22% of the votes cast, that means around 300 Million votes have been cast. Around 1.1 Billion shares remain in contention. Lets be conservative and suppose Peltz has 12% of the vote. That puts Peltz at around 170 Million shares on his side.
Trian has control of ~30 Million shares. That means Peltz has already generated around 140 Million votes apart from the shares that he controls. This is an accomplishment. Of course, this proxy fight is only just getting started. Peltz has a long way to go in order to get a seat. But how many votes does Peltz need?
Last year, around 250 Million shares did not cast a vote. Those were likely retail investors who simply did not receive materials to vote, or just didn't bother to take the time to vote. Let's again be conservative and say that due to the intense media coverage surrounding this proxy fight, more retail shareholders will be energized and vote because they feel that this voting session is more consequential than 2023... Which it demonstrably is. I have family member who probably has never bothered to vote before, who plans to because so much is stake. Because of this, let's moderate the "non-
voters votes" to 200 Million shares.
That means there are about 1.2 Billion votes available. Of that, around 25% (~300 Million) of the
voters votes have already
voted been cast. In our hypothetical, Peltz has about 170 Million votes to Iger's 130 Million votes. In order for Peltz to secure a seat, he needs to get at least ~430 Million more votes.
I suspect that more leaks will be forthcoming over the next week. We still haven't heard what the Murdochs are planning to do. They reportedly own ~63 Million shares. That's an important voting block for each side.
Edit: I had a few typos where I erroneously referred to "votes" as "voters." I think I accidentally slipped into "political" language rather than "financial" language. Thanks to
@flynnibus for pointing this out. You can see the errors with strikethroughs for transparency.