Offer your thoughts or opinion on the input financial query or topic using your financial background.

Is it possible to influence a company's actions by buying stock?
Energy Transfer Partners, LP (stock symbol ETP) is the parent company of Dakota Access LLC, the developer of the Dakota Access Pipeline.  Since ETP is a publicly traded company, it is certainly possible to purchase the stock. To answer your questions: Would it not be possible to buy their stocks, bring down the price of the stocks and keep it there until investors pull out because it is financially unwise to these investors? You cannot artificially bring the price of a stock down by buying the stock.  Purchasing large enough amounts would theoretically cause the price to go up, not down. You could theoretically cause the stock to go down by shorting the stock (borrowing shares and then selling them), but it would take a lot of shares to do this, and may not be successful.  If not successful, your losses are potentially unlimited. Would it alternatively be possible to buy enough stock to have a voice in the operations of the company? Yes, you could theoretically purchase enough of the stock to control the company.  The market capitalization of ETP is currently $17.9 Billion; if you owned half of the stock, you would have complete control of the company.  But buying that much stock would certainly influence the price of the stock, so it would cost you more than half of that amount to buy that much stock. You could get yourself a voice at the table for less without owning a full half of the stock, but you would not have full control, and would need support from others to get the outcome you want. Alternatively, someone determined to exert their influence could theoretically make an offer to purchase the Dakota Access subsidiary from ETP, which might be less costly than purchasing half of the entire corporation. Even if an extremely wealthy person were to try one of these options and destroy this company, it wouldn't necessarily stop another company from building something similar.  The investors you purchased the company from would have billions of dollars to do so with.