I'm skeptical of dual class shareholders. Honestly, it's not a terribly inventive idea. So why hasn't it been done before on such a widespread basis? If the a

I'm skeptical of dual class shareholders. Honestly, it's not a terribly inventive idea. So why hasn't it been done before on such a widespread basis? If the ability to vote is valuable then that means investors will be willing to pay more for it. If it's not valuable then why do founders insist on reducing investor power? There's a contradiction in there somewhere. If capital were to suddenly dry up what would happen to the value of most of these companies? I would predict a significant drop in valuations for all companies that aren't monopolies (e.g. Google and Facebook). Steve Jobs is often used as an example of why we need "CEOs for life." But let's not forget that Jobs had fairly little shareholder power in Apple - most of his billions came from Pixar. So ironically, at the time Jobs was brought back to Apple it was basically equivalent to bringing in a non-founder CEO from the perspective shareholder power.