InstitutionClaim Cited
The Hershey Company and Milton Hershey School Trust
Milton Hershey gave control of his chocolate company to a trust for a residential school, joining a competitive public company to a charitable purpose across generations. The attempted 2002 sale of that controlling stake revealed the design's central tension: trustees could pursue financially defensible diversification while employees, managers, alumni, residents, and Pennsylvania's attorney general challenged the sale as a threat to the wider institution they depended on.
When a charitable trust controls a company for one named beneficiary, who can challenge the trustees when commercial judgment affects a much wider community?