This morning National Legal and Policy Center presented a proposal at Comcast Corporation‘s annual shareholder meeting that asked the board to implement a policy to require the Chair of the Board of Directors to be an independent member from the CEO. In other words, the same executive could not hold both roles.
Currently Brian Roberts (pictured above) is Chairman and CEO.
Comcast’s board of directors opposed our proposal, as explained on page 56 of the company’s proxy statement. NLPC responded to the board’s opposition statement in an exempt solicitation report circulated to the company’s shareholders.
Speaking at the meeting as sponsor of the resolution was Paul Chesser, director of NLPC’s Corporate Integrity Project. A transcript of his three-minute remarks, which you can listen to here, follows:
I’m Paul Chesser of National Legal and Policy Center, presenting Proposal 4, which asks Comcast to separate the offices of Chairman and Chief Executive Officer.
The case rests on the financial record of the past five years.
Comcast shareholders have lost approximately 40 percent of their investment, including dividends, over that period.
The S&P 500, of which Comcast is a component, has returned approximately 87 percent.
When Chairman/CEO Brian Roberts closed the 2011 acquisition of NBCUniversal, Comcast was worth roughly ten times Netflix.
Today, Netflix is worth four times Comcast.
That is not a market judgment about cable, broadcast, streaming or film production as industries.
That is a market judgment about how this Company has been run.
Mr. Roberts has, in his own words, acknowledged the problem.
In the third quarter of 2025, he told shareholders that Comcast is “making steady progress as we reposition the company for long-term, sustained growth.”
A Company that requires repositioning, is a Company that was placed in a poor position in the first place, due to management and governance shortcomings.
In January, Comcast spun off networks including CNBC and MSNBC into Versant Media Group.
Versant comprises the cable networks Mr. Roberts spent more than a decade assembling as part of the NBCUniversal acquisition.
Comcast paid roughly 30 billion dollars for those assets.
The market now values them at approximately 5 billion dollars.
In December, Comcast pursued Warner Bros. Discovery.
But Co-Chief Executive Officer Mike Cavanagh told investors that Comcast “didn’t expect that we had a high likelihood of prevailing.”
Comcast was in such a weakened state competitively, that the deal went to Paramount Skydance.
My organization raised many similar concerns at last year’s annual meeting about the stewardship of Comcast’s assets.
Our 2025 independent-chair proposal, though it did not pass, received approximately 43 percent of votes cast by shareholders other than Mr. Roberts.
Mr. Roberts holds one third of Comcast’s voting power through his Class B shares.
But his economic ownership of the Company is about 1 percent of total equity.
This proposal does not strip Mr. Roberts of his shares, his voting power, or his role at the Company that his father founded.
It asks only that the person leading the Board not also be the person the Board is meant to evaluate.
Sixty percent of S&P 500 companies have already separated those two offices.
Comcast shareholders deserve the same.
I urge a vote FOR Proposal 4.
Thank you.
All assertions made by Chesser in his above remarks are footnoted and can be found in NLPC’s exempt solicitation report, here. An executive summary of the report can be viewed here.
Read NLPC’s shareholder proposal for Comcast Corporation’s annual meeting here.
Listen to Chesser’s three-minute remarks in support of the proposal here.
