The Publicly Traded Person
The publicly traded person is a living human being who has issued tradable shares in themselves and ceded binding authority over their own decisions to the people who hold those shares. Mike Merrill is the first, and so far the only, person to do it. The phrase is also how the project he built, KmikeyM, is most often described in a single line: the world’s first publicly traded person. It names a category with one member.
The idea
A public company issues shares so that outsiders can own a piece of its business and, in proportion to their stake, influence how it is run. The publicly traded person applies that same structure to a life rather than a business. The shares are not claims on revenue or assets. They are claims on participation: the right to vote, with binding force, on the decisions the person faces.
What is being capitalized is not a product or a cash flow but a self. Shareholders do not buy a share of what Merrill makes. They buy a share of what he does, and they decide some of it. He has been obligated by shareholder vote to change his diet, his party registration, where he lives, and how he handles his closest relationships. The market sets a price on all of it, and that price is a running, public estimate of what a voting seat in another person’s life is worth.
Not a company, and not a creator
The concept is easy to mistake for two more familiar things, and it is neither.
It is not a company. There is no underlying business issuing registered securities, no earnings to discount, and no liquidation value in the ordinary sense (see Governance and Legal Structure and KmikeyM Economics). The corporate form is borrowed as a governance technology, not as a financial one.
It is not the creator economy. Buying a share does not buy access, content, or a subscription to someone’s output. It buys governance. A patron supports an artist so the artist can keep doing what they choose; a shareholder in a person acquires the power to choose for them. The relationship runs the other direction. As Merrill has put it, with characteristic bluntness about the asymmetry: “I would rather be an investor; I would rather buy into this and have control over someone. But no one else was going to do it, so I guess I had to.”
How a person becomes tradable
Three rules turn the idea into a working system, all established at The KmikeyM Launch in 2008 and detailed in KmikeyM:
- A real market. Shares trade at prices shareholders set themselves, with no market-maker (see Share Price History).
- Binding votes. Proposals that pass are not advisory. The person is obligated to follow through.
- A non-voting founder. The subject holds most of the shares but cannot vote them, so governance belongs entirely to outside shareholders.
The third rule is the one that makes the concept real rather than performative. Without it, the subject could always overrule the market and the idea would collapse into a stunt. By keeping the shares and giving away the votes, the person genuinely hands the controls to other people.
Lineage
The idea did not arrive from finance. It came from net art. Projects like etoy.CORPORATION, RTMark, and the Yes Men have long treated the corporation as a medium, staging the company as a living, ownable thing. The publicly traded person inverts the move: instead of making a corporation behave like a person, it makes a person behave like a corporation, and then actually distributes the governance. A second influence, Warren Buffett’s shareholder letters, supplied the tone of candid accountability to one’s owners. Merrill’s reframing was to want the other chair. “I didn’t want to be the famous investor,” he has said. “I wanted to be the beloved and valuable company.”
Why anyone would do this
The mechanism is strange, but the motive is plain and human. Merrill has described the project less as a financial venture than as a way of not being alone with his decisions. Writing a proposal forces him to articulate what he is struggling with; the vote returns the judgment of a community that has a real stake in the outcome. “It’s like having a superpower,” he has said. “It means as long as I’m honest, I never have to be alone.”
That is the quiet claim underneath the spectacle. A publicly traded person is a person who has chosen to hold their identity in common with other people, and to be held to it. The motto the project adopted, “Community Through Capitalism,” reads as a joke and is also a literal description of the method: the apparatus of ownership is used to manufacture belonging.
There is a more unsettling reading underneath that one. Everyone already has shareholders. Partners, family, employers, friends, and institutions all hold informal stakes in our choices and exert quiet influence over them; we simply never name them or tally their votes. What the publicly traded person does is make that implicit social contract explicit, and the explicitness is the uncomfortable part. To take the idea seriously is to be forced to ask who the shareholders in your own life already are, how much weight each of them carries, and how much of yourself you have, without quite noticing, already sold.
A category of one
Others have attempted versions of the idea, most visibly during the crypto era, when “social tokens” briefly made personal markets fashionable. The closest was Alex Masmej, who in 2020 issued a personal token, $ALEX, on Ethereum and even let holders vote on some of his daily choices through a feature he called “Control My Life.” But the center of gravity there was a fundraise: the token was structured mainly as an income-sharing agreement, a way to raise capital against his future earnings, and like the other attempts it did not last. The difference is sustained governance. KmikeyM was never really about the money raised at the start; it is about the binding votes that have run for eighteen years since.
So the publicly traded person is best understood not as an experiment but as a governance and identity system that happens to have a single subject. It has rules you can participate in, a market you can read, and a track record long enough that its permanence is the point. No one else has sustained the title, which is part of why it functions as its own genus. KmikeyM is the world’s first publicly traded person, and for now the only one.
References
- The Man Who Tokenized Himself Gives Holders Power Over His Life — CoinDesk, 2020 (on Alex Masmej / $ALEX)
- How I Became the World’s First Publicly Traded Person — TEDxVienna, 2021 (source of quotations)