> What does this even mean? Pension funds have a lot of board seats? I only see one person from Blackrock on their board right now.

The Board members are appointed by the Intel Corporate Governance & Nominating Committee, the chair of the committee is Barbara G. Novick, co-founder of BlackRock. The board is de-facto run by the trio of BlackRock, Vanguard and State Street, smaller investors follow their lead.

> Why would it be bad for a pension fund to have influence on running a company? Are their incentives somehow mis-aligned with other investors?

Alignment of interest is not magical: it's necessary to achieve results but it isn't sufficient. You need actual talents, vision, execution to make things happen, not just interest.

Pension funds have no vision beyond "stock go up", no strategy other than "more revenue, less costs". In the end they are roughly as good at running things as are socialist states: economy is owned by everyone so no one in particular, run by people who never proved that can run a lemonade stand. In fact a successful socialist state (if they ever existed) would be indistinguishable from a huge pension fund that swallowed the whole economy.