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> FB has not paid any cash dividends, neither has Google, but both have large profits. It's uncommon for tech companies to pay cash dividends The difference is

> FB has not paid any cash dividends, neither has Google, but both have large profits. It's uncommon for tech companies to pay cash dividends The difference is that people can purchase shares in Facebook and Google that give them voting rights. That is not true for Snapchat. The fact that Snapchat isn't giving dividends today isn't notable per se, but the fact that it's not giving dividends and investors have no mechanism to influence the company's direction (which includes pressuring them to provide dividends in the future) is literally unprecedented.

marcell 10y ago
Eh, not really. Google and FB both structure their shares so the founders own >51% of the shares, so your votes are meaningless. In fact Google recently explicitly restructured their shares to make sure the founders maintained majority share going forward. Market premium on GOOGL (voting shares) is 2.4% as of this writing, FWIW.
- dragonwriter 10y ago
  > Google and FB both structure their shares so the founders own >51% of the shares, so your votes are meaningless. It's possible for disagreement to exist between the founders, requiring a majority coalition to be built using non-government-held votes.
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > Google and FB both structure their shares so the founders own >51% of the shares, so your votes are meaningless. In fact Google recently explicitly restructured their shares to make sure the founders maintained majority share going forward. Minority shareholders have rights even without majority voting control. Some of those rights do apply to non-voting shares, but they're much more limited. GOOGL isn't particularly relevant here; all that says is that investors today are confident in the leadership's plans. That could change tomorrow, and it means nothing for Snapchat.
cycrutchfield 10y ago
Remind me again what the difference in price between GOOG and GOOGL is. That seems like a good indicator for the value of voting rights, no?
- chimeracoder 10y ago
  > That seems like a good indicator for the value of voting rights, no? It's more of an indicator of the current level confidence in Google's leadership. You can look at that as a point-in-time snapshot of how much investors value voting rights in Google today, sure, but that doesn't mean much for Google a year from now, or for Snapchat today. If investors lost confidence in Google's ability to execute and believed that the leadership was the root cause of this failure, then the ability to vote them out (or even simply put pressure on them) would carry a greater premium than it does today.

marcell 10y ago

Eh, not really. Google and FB both structure their shares so the founders own >51% of the shares, so your votes are meaningless. In fact Google recently explicitly restructured their shares to make sure the founders maintained majority share going forward. Market premium on GOOGL (voting shares) is 2.4% as of this writing, FWIW.

dragonwriter 10y ago
> Google and FB both structure their shares so the founders own >51% of the shares, so your votes are meaningless. It's possible for disagreement to exist between the founders, requiring a majority coalition to be built using non-government-held votes.
chimeracoder 10y ago
> Google and FB both structure their shares so the founders own >51% of the shares, so your votes are meaningless. In fact Google recently explicitly restructured their shares to make sure the founders maintained majority share going forward. Minority shareholders have rights even without majority voting control. Some of those rights do apply to non-voting shares, but they're much more limited. GOOGL isn't particularly relevant here; all that says is that investors today are confident in the leadership's plans. That could change tomorrow, and it means nothing for Snapchat.

cycrutchfield 10y ago

Remind me again what the difference in price between GOOG and GOOGL is. That seems like a good indicator for the value of voting rights, no?

chimeracoder 10y ago
> That seems like a good indicator for the value of voting rights, no? It's more of an indicator of the current level confidence in Google's leadership. You can look at that as a point-in-time snapshot of how much investors value voting rights in Google today, sure, but that doesn't mean much for Google a year from now, or for Snapchat today. If investors lost confidence in Google's ability to execute and believed that the leadership was the root cause of this failure, then the ability to vote them out (or even simply put pressure on them) would carry a greater premium than it does today.