Target screwed us. Now their investors want blood.

Inside the shareholder rebellion trying to hold Target's leadership accountable

Are any queer people shopping at Target now?

Based in Minneapolis, Targay was once beloved. Now, every casual mention of the store on social media is met with immediate disgust that anyone would shop there. “I suppose you shop at Target” has become an insult hurled at idiots online. It was hard to dethrone Chick-fil-A on the Most Hated Companies list, but they did it.

After abandoning their support for the LGBTQ community, Target followed up by rolling back DEI initiatives, cooperating with ICE, and licking the goddamn boots of the Trump administration as thoroughly as they could. None of us wants to be associated with a brand that changed its logo from a circle to a middle finger.

Target’s reputation has gotten so bad that its own investors are rebelling. Ahead of the company’s annual shareholder meeting on June 10, a group of major investors is pushing to vote out the board members responsible for years of fuckups that have left consumers furious and stakeholders watching their money evaporate.

Emma Bayes, Deputy Director of SOC Investment Group, speaks for one group of investors and she’s not mincing words. “As shareholders, we have lost faith in the current board leadership to steer the company after years of operational blunders and underperformance,” she told me.

Under CEO Brian Cornell and Lead Independent Director Christine Leahy, Target bled customers, revenue, and reputation in nearly equal measure. They ran one of America’s most beloved retailers straight into the ground.

Cornell picked fights he couldn’t win and lost the ones that mattered. Leahy helped him cover his ass the whole way down. Nearly half of Target’s own employees now say they don’t believe in the store’s future.

That’s a company in freefall. Cornell and Leahy cut the parachute.

Cornell did it by caving to MAGA activists who were protesting in stores, destroying merchandise, and terrorizing employees over Pride flags. Company leadership claimed employees felt unsafe because Target was selling Pride merchandise.

In his twisted reality, the employees weren’t unsafe because MAGA thugs were ransacking the store. They were in danger because of the rainbow flag and t-shirts that said “Love. Laugh. Lesbian.”

Religious right leaders were openly calling for gays to be put to death, and Cornell sided with them.

Cornell didn’t pledge to protect his employees from far-right extremists losing their shit over onesies and flags. He yanked the merchandise, insulted the customers who’d been loyal for years, and thought that would be the end of it.

If there’s one thing you learn growing up gay, it’s that you can’t cave to bullies. It never works. We weren’t rioting because Target didn’t have the pansexual flag for sale in Boise. The far-right kept boycotting Target regardless. The only thing Cornell’s cowardice accomplished was handing them a win and losing us in the process.

Then, days into Trump 2.0, Cornell took an encore and gutted diversity initiatives. Target spent years building its reputation as a company that valued all of its customers, employees, and suppliers, and he torched every bit of it on the altar of MAGA.

The daughters of one of Target’s co-founders called it “a betrayal.” So did Latino, Black, and LGBTQ customers, employees, and shareholders. The brand that spent decades telling everyone it welcomed them had spent a few months making brutally clear it didn’t.

Twin Cities Pride threw Target out of their hometown parade. The organization had been a sponsor for 18 years. Cutting ties cost them $50,000. It’s not just that queer people won’t give Target our money. We won’t even take theirs.

So Cornell resigned. And here’s where Leahy steps in to make everything spectacularly worse.

As Lead Independent Director and chair of the compensation committee, Leahy has been the silent architect behind every one of these disasters. She nodded along as he torched the brand, and when the whole rotten thing finally collapsed, she rewarded him on the way out.

When Cornell stepped down as CEO in February, the board didn’t clean house. They handed him a new title, Executive Chair and Special Advisor, and a compensation package to go with it. Nobody asked shareholders. Leahy’s board just did it.

Cornell receives a base salary of $1.12 million, a bonus target equal to 200% of that, and a $6 million stock grant through March 2027. The motherfucker gets six million dollars for driving the company into a ditch. He was too busy sucking off Trump supporters to pay attention to the road.

The June 10 meeting is the first chance shareholders get to say anything about it. They’re not voting on the compensation; that ship has sailed. They’re voting on whether Cornell keeps his board seat at all. Leahy is on the ballot too.

The board replaced Cornell with Michael Fiddelke, an insider who helped build the exact strategy that blew up in everyone’s faces. Target’s stock dropped over 6% the day that news broke.

They’re not changing a goddamn thing. They brought in a fresh face to run the same failed playbook and kept the guy who wrote it on the payroll to whisper in his ear. It’s not a turnaround. It’s a cover-up.

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What kind of corporate leadership makes decisions so catastrophically bad that simply having their presence in a Pride parade would be considered offensive to the festivities? That’s like getting told you’re too controversial for Christmas.

“The board’s decision to make Brian Cornell Executive Chair after years of underperformance reflects a troubling lack of accountability,” Bayes told me. “The company’s recent controversies and underperformance are symptoms of broader oversight failures that point to the urgent need for new board leadership.”

The investors are pushing shareholders to vote against both Cornell and Leahy on June 10. It’s a David vs. Goliath fight, and Goliath has a lot of index funds.

Vanguard, BlackRock, and State Street together control nearly 30% of Target’s shares. They didn’t buy in because they believe in the company. They bought in because Target is in the index. Passive fund managers don’t vote against boards; they collect their fees, rubber-stamp management, and move on.

They don’t give a damn about employees, civil rights, or whether Cornell spent years torching the brand to kiss MAGA ass. The insiders will circle the wagons, cash the checks, and call it governance.

But a public vote against the board is a public record. Every no vote says: we saw what you did, we know who did it, and we refuse to let it go uncontested. Cornell and Leahy are counting on everyone to stay quiet and move on.