Ford Motor Company is public, but the Ford family controls 40% of the vote through Class B stock, and 99.90% of those shares sit in a family voting trust. Ordinary common stock carries the other 60%. The largest holders of common stock in Ford’s 2026 proxy were Vanguard (11.68%), State Street (8.41%) and BlackRock (8.36%).
Holders of common stock have 60% of the general voting power and holders of Class B stock the remaining 40%. Votes per Class B share are reset each year to keep that split: 36.75 votes per share at the 2025 annual meeting.
02
The family votes as a block
A voting trust held 70,778,212 Class B shares, 99.90% of the class. Its trustees are Edsel B. Ford II, William Clay Ford, Jr., Benson Ford, Jr. and Alfred B. Ford, and they must vote the shares as directed by a plurality of the trust.
03
Index funds lead the public side
Vanguard (11.68%), State Street (8.41%) and BlackRock (8.36%) were the largest holders of common stock. State Street's figure includes the 3.5% it holds as trustee of Ford's employee savings plans.
04
Family in the boardroom
William Clay Ford, Jr. is executive chair and chair of the board; Alexandra Ford English and Henry Ford III are directors. Jim Farley is president and CEO.
What changed in 2025-26
Equal-vote proposal fails again
At the 14 May 2026 annual meeting, a shareholder proposal for one vote per share was rejected: 2,170,748,325 votes for and 2,848,002,181 against. Its proponent said similar proposals had averaged 83% support from independent shareholders between 2016 and 2024.
A costly EV reset
In December 2025 Ford said it no longer saw a path to long-term profit for its EV business without changes. It cancelled three planned EVs, ended production of the current F-150 Lightning and expected a pre-tax write-down of about $8.5 billion, plus about $3 billion tied to exiting its BlueOval SK battery venture.
Software and AI in-house
Ford’s 2026 proxy says it brought more hardware and software development in-house so that features such as AI and assisted driving reach more customers, and expanded partnerships with Renault, Koรง Holding (Ford Otosan) and Volkswagen for lower-cost vehicles.
Leadership turnover below the top
In April 2026 Ford disclosed that Doug Field, its chief EV, digital and design officer, would leave the company. The family’s control of the board did not change.
Who holds what
Ford family voting trust
Stake99.90% of Class B stock; Class B has 40% of the vote
Source and dateFord 2026 proxy
The Vanguard Group
Stake11.68% of common stock
Source and dateFord 2026 proxy
State Street
Stake8.41% of common stock (incl. employee-plan trust)
Source and dateFord 2026 proxy
BlackRock
Stake8.36% of common stock
Source and dateFord 2026 proxy
All common stock
Stake60% of the vote
Source and dateFord 2026 proxy (record date 16 Mar 2026)
What it means for you
Treat Ford as family-controlled for any governance question: a takeover or a recapitalisation needs the family's votes.
Read the annual equal-vote result as a gauge of outside investors' patience, not as a path to change.
When you model Ford's strategy, weight family priorities on succession and long-term bets alongside quarterly results.
If you hold Ford through an index fund, note that the three largest public holders are fund managers, not activists.
Watch how the EV reset and in-house software work show up in results; control is stable, the strategy is not.
The Business Engineer lens
Ford pairs very stable control with a strategy in flux: the family vote locks in who decides, while the EV reset and in-house software show how much is still being decided. In the AI era, the question for a dual-class carmaker is whether patient owners buy time to build software capability or shield slow decisions.
Ford is public. The Ford family controls 40% of the vote through Class B stock; Vanguard, State Street and BlackRock are the largest holders of common stock, according to the 2026 proxy.
The complete explainer, cleaned up and reformatted for mobile.
In short
Ford is a public company, but the Ford family keeps 40% of the voting power through its Class B shares, 99.9% of which sit in a family voting trust. That 40% is fixed by Ford’s charter: the votes per Class B share are reset each year. The largest holders of the publicly traded common stock are Vanguard (11.68%), State Street (8.41%) and BlackRock (8.36%).
Sources: Ford 2026 proxy. Analysis by The Business Engineer.
Correction (10 Oct 2026): an earlier version of this page showed a ‘Ford Family Trust: 2.0%’ slice next to undated fund stakes. The family’s position is a voting one: Class B stock with 40% of the total vote. Holdings now come from Ford’s 2026 proxy statement.
How we source: figures on this page come from the company’s own filings (SEC 10-K, 10-Q, prospectus and earnings releases, or its annual report), with the period stated next to each number; outside estimates appear only labelled, with their source and date. Last refreshed October 2026. Our methodology.
State Street’s figure includes shares it holds as trustee of Ford’s own employee savings plans (3.5% of common stock).
Who owns Ford?
Ford Motor Company has two classes of voting stock. Common stock trades on the New York Stock Exchange and carries one vote per share; together it holds 60% of the voting power. Class B stock is held by members of the Ford family and carries the other 40% (proxy). The number of votes per Class B share is adjusted every year to keep that split fixed: 36.75 votes per share at the 2025 annual meeting.
Almost all of the Class B shares, 99.90%, are held in a family voting trust, which lets the family vote as a block. Individual family members such as Edsel B. Ford II and Lynn F. Alandt also appear in the proxy as large holders of Class B stock.
The largest holders of common stock
Among public shareholders, the biggest are index-fund managers: The Vanguard Group with 11.68%, State Street with 8.41% (including shares it holds as trustee of Ford’s employee savings plans) and BlackRock with 8.36%.
Who runs Ford
William Clay Ford, Jr., Henry Ford’s great-grandson, is executive chair, and two more family members, Alexandra Ford English and Henry Ford III, sit on the board. Jim Farley is president and chief executive officer.
Ford ownership: timeline
1903
Ford Motor Company founded
By Henry Ford and investors in Detroit.
1956
IPO with two share classes
The family keeps Class B stock and 40% of the vote (proxy).
Every year
Class B votes reset
Votes per Class B share are recalculated to keep the 40% split.
2026
Vanguard 11.68%, State Street 8.41%, BlackRock 8.36%
Most dual-class structures give founders extra votes per share, so their control fades as they sell. Ford’s is different: the family’s share of the vote is fixed at 40% no matter how many Class B shares it holds. That makes Ford very hard to take over and keeps the family central to every major decision, from capital allocation to succession.
Shareholder proposals to move to one vote per share come up regularly and have won majority support from non-family holders, but they cannot pass without the family’s votes. The structure buys long-term stability at the cost of outside investors’ influence.
What to watch
Each year’s vote on equal voting rights (and the non-family support it gets)
Gennaro Cuofano is a CRO and tech executive who has worked in AI since late 2015, starting with bringing NLP, natural-language generation, voice and chatbot products to the marketing industry. His background is in law and finance: he holds a Master's degree in Law and an International MBA with an emphasis on corporate finance (LUISS Business School and the University of San Diego, 2012), and worked as a financial analyst at a real-estate investment firm in San Diego and as an assistant controller. His work focuses on business model strategy, business engineering and, more broadly, structural analysis: how companies make money, read from their own filings. He created FourWeekMBA and leads research there and at The Business Engineer, his newsletter on AI and business strategy, with over 95,000 subscribers and more than 1,000 published analyses. His writing has also appeared on Entrepreneur (for example, How to Digitize a Family Business in Europe) and HackerNoon. Find him on LinkedIn and Substack. See how we source.
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