Misuse of Executive Power
In April 2015 the shareholders of KmikeyM formally censured Mike Merrill for buying a house without asking them. He wrote the censure himself, in the language of a corporate resolution, and put it to a vote. It passed with 89% in favor.
It is the clearest demonstration on the record of what the arrangement actually is, because it is the one time the machinery was turned on the person who built it.
What happened
Merrill bought a house. It moved fast, as house purchases do, and he did it without a vote.
Shareholders objected. Under the project’s own logic they were right to: the rule is that major life decisions go to the shareholders, and a house is not a marginal case. Merrill’s own account concedes the point rather than defending it. “We understand that this should have been a shareholder decision.”
What he did next is the unusual part. Rather than apologize informally, he drafted a resolution against himself and asked the shareholders to adopt it.
The resolution
It is written in the full WHEREAS and RESOLVED form of a corporate motion, which reads as both scrupulous and faintly absurd when the subject is one man and a house.
The operative findings, in order: the criteria for which decisions reach a vote are not clear; the shareholders have proven to have the project’s best interests at heart; Merrill entered a purchase agreement without consultation; and the shareholders, “while likely approving the purchase of a home, do not approve the means.”
Then three resolutions. That shareholders remain opposed to major decisions being made without consultation. That in this specific instance they oppose how the purchase was made. And, third, that understanding some decisions require speed, they urge Merrill to build systems allowing a faster shareholder response.
A yes vote added your name to the censure. A no vote meant accepting that some choices get made quickly and the system was working as it stood.
Why it matters
The third resolution is the one that outlived the incident. The shareholders did not only object. They identified the structural cause, which was that the system had no way to answer an urgent question quickly, and told him to fix it rather than simply to behave better.
That distinction runs through the project’s better moments. The same shape appears three years later in Project Bankruptcy, where a request to abandon every stalled commitment was refused and replaced with a requirement that every future proposal carry a defined criterion for success. In both cases shareholders declined the apology and asked for the mechanism.
It also marks the limit of Merrill’s own authority honestly. His reserved power over the project is agenda control: he decides what reaches a ballot. Here he used that power to put himself on the ballot. The censure exists because he chose to write it, which is either the strongest evidence that the accountability is real or the strongest evidence that it is his to grant. The record does not settle which, and the page should not pretend to.