But returns have been slim for shareholders who held on throughout that period.
Mr. Slim is a shareholder in The New York Times Co., currently holding a little more than 7 percent stake.
Mr. Slim is a major shareholder in The New York Times Company.
Aetna, which has been under pressure from disgruntled shareholders to slim down, said operating earnings were $184 million, or $1.29 a share, compared with $158.5 million, or $1.01 a share, in the comparable quarter a year earlier.
The companies share leadership at the very top, with Mr. Slim the chairman and controlling shareholder of both.
By the following year Slim had become the largest shareholder in the American media company the New York Times Company, financial conglomerate Citigroup, luxury retailer Saks, and consumer electronics retailer Circuit City.
Ms. Stout, a professor at Cornell Law School, has written a slim and elegant polemic, "The Shareholder Value Myth" Berrett-Koehler Publisherss) to explain the idea's two problems: It's worked out horribly and, as a matter of law, it's not true.
(Mr. Slim is the second-largest shareholder in The New York Times, behind the Sulzberger family, and in 2009 extended a $250 million loan to The Times, which the company says it intends to repay in early 2012).
Hewlett's lawsuit contends HP won its slim majority in the March 19 shareholder vote by threatening to take business from at least one investor, Deutsche Bank.
For BP, though, the question is how long it can continue splurging cash on its shareholders without becoming so slim that it is vulnerable to a takeover.
