The Vasectomy Vote
The Vasectomy Vote was a shareholder resolution held on August 10, 2008, approximately seven months after the KmikeyM initial public offering. Mike Merrill proposed that his shareholders decide whether he should undergo a vasectomy. It was the first time a personal, bodily decision was put to the shareholder vote, and it remains the single most cited event in KmikeyM’s history.
Background
Prior to the vasectomy proposal, KmikeyM shareholder votes had concerned projects and investments. The experiment was still young, and the scope of shareholder authority over Mike’s personal life had not yet been tested. Mike framed the vasectomy in financial terms: “Children are a financial drain. The time investment of raising a child is immense. The responsibility is epic.” The argument positioned the vote as a matter of shareholder interest, not personal preference.
Mike was living with his girlfriend (Shareholder #7) at the time. He did not tell her about the proposal before submitting it to shareholders.
The Vote
The resolution was rejected. Final tally: 456 votes against, 387 votes in favor (54% No, 46% Yes). The margin was narrow but decisive.
The result was shaped by a proxy fight. After learning about the proposal, Mike’s girlfriend recruited Greg Borenstein, the largest individual shareholder with 500 shares and the developer who had built the KmikeyM platform, to vote against the resolution. Borenstein’s block of shares tipped the balance.
When she objected to the proposal, Mike’s response was blunt: “Buy more shares.” This did not resolve the conflict.
Aftermath
Mike later admitted during his TEDx Vienna talk that he was “relieved” when the vote failed. The comment suggested the proposal may have functioned partly as a test of the system’s boundaries rather than a straightforward request for shareholder guidance.
The vote set a lasting precedent. It established that shareholders could weigh in on intimate, bodily decisions, not just career moves or financial matters. Subsequent votes on diet (shareholders made Mike pescetarian), political registration (shareholders registered him as a Republican), and romantic relationships all followed the path the vasectomy vote opened.
The girlfriend’s perspective
Her reaction has been widely reported, but often simplified. In her own account, the issue was not the vote itself, which she described as “a small thing.” The deeper frustration came after a Wired article about the vote reduced her to a plot device in the KmikeyM narrative. She felt her identity had been flattened into a supporting role: “I didn’t want to play into it. I felt like my status as a girlfriend earned me his ear.” Her broader assessment was stark: “The Mike I knew got swallowed up by KmikeyM.”
Media Coverage
The vasectomy vote appears in virtually every major piece of KmikeyM press coverage. It has been reported or referenced by Wired, VICE, CNBC, Fast Company, Daily Mail, The Hustle, Playboy, Love+Radio, Harvard Advocate, Boston College Law Review, Nas Daily, and Ripley’s Believe It or Not. Mike discussed it during his TEDx Vienna presentation.
Playboy captured the tension at the heart of the event: “A vasectomy vote is a funny, stakes-raising stunt, but would they still want to play if they knew a little more?”
The vote’s staying power in press coverage reflects its utility as a narrative hook. It compresses the entire KmikeyM concept into a single, concrete example: a man who lets strangers vote on whether he can have children.
Significance
The vasectomy vote was not the most consequential KmikeyM decision (Mike did not get the vasectomy), but it was the most consequential moment for the project’s public identity. It demonstrated that the experiment was not limited to safe, reversible choices. It forced both shareholders and outside observers to confront the logical endpoint of collective governance over an individual life: control over the body itself.
It also revealed the costs of that experiment for people adjacent to it. His girlfriend’s experience showed that shareholder governance does not occur in isolation. The people closest to the publicly traded person absorb consequences they did not sign up for.
The vote drew the first shareholders from the Urban Honking community, many of whom were friends and collaborators from Mike’s years in Portland. Their participation made the early KmikeyM votes feel more like collective decisions among peers than abstract shareholder exercises.
References
- Meet the Man Who Sold His Fate to Investors at $1 a Share — Wired, 2013
- Mike Merrill Is a Publicly Traded Person — VICE, 2012
- WWCD — Love+Radio, 2017
- The Publicly Traded Human Goes NSFW — Playboy, 2017
- Human Capital: Investing in the World’s First Publicly Traded Person — Harvard Advocate, 2018
- How I Became the World’s First Publicly Traded Person — TEDxVienna, 2021
- The Man Who Sold His Life — Nas Daily, 2024
- The Man Who Sold Shares of Himself — The Hustle, 2017