Four decades ago, a mutual-fund industry graybeard warned him that he would “destroy the industry.” Mr. Bogle’s plan was to create a new mutual-fund company owned not by the founding entrepreneur and his partners but by the shareholders of the funds themselves.
This would keep overhead low for investors, as would a second part of his plan: an index fund that would mimic the performance of the overall stock market rather than pay genius managers to guess which stocks might go up or down.