Company Isn’t Sure If It Fired Its CEO

“The night watchman controls the company, sort of,” I wrote last week, “if he can change the locks overnight and not let the managers and directors and shareholders in the door the next morning.” Control of a company is fractured and elusive, because “a company” is fractured and elusive: It is not an identifiable coherent object, but a set of people and decisions and pronouncements and products and web pages and filings. In the cleanest form of corporate-finance theory, some hierarchy of control flows up from the night watchman to the managers to the CEO to the board to the shareholders, and the people at each level of the hierarchy have tools to make sure that the people below them in the hierarchy can do what they want. Rockwell Medical Inc. is, let’s say, a company.