The Chairman of the Board, Chen, now has a fiduciary duty to replace Watsa, the man who put him in and outrageously compensated him.
Three things can happen:
1) Watsa/Chen fight to keep Watsa on the board and get massive amount of negative attention for godawful governance practices....effectively ignoring public shareholders. This would be very bad.
2) Watsa resigns / leaves quietly and goes off into the sunset. Highly unlikely in my kind if you know him And understand how much skin he has in the game.
3) Watsa says EF-F this!, and gets a bit more $ cash on the side and outs together an offer to take $BB private. I believe this will happen for sure. If anyone noticed, Watsa / Fairfax just sold another asset THIS WEEK for USD$1.4B in cash. That's just under half of $BB's market cap. With his additional 15%, he's going to make a lowball offer and take this private in short order.
The only question is whether he'll drag this company through the mud in some fashion (see #1), whether earnings will will look like and/or what funny stuff he might pull to get the most attractive price.
Ones things for sure. Watsa is not walking away from his biggest AND worst investment in the last decade without a peep.
CR