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Flip this perspective. Zuckerberg has iron-clad control of FB. He could unilaterally decide that quarterly profits, hell, any profits, do not matter and there

• neya 7y ago
  In the same token, I think we should also hold Twitter accountable. Have you seen their "In case you missed X's tweets" notification spam? That's the "Some random nobody hosted a watch party" equivalent on Facebook. And it can't even be turned off. All this for what? To present to some investor on a powerpoint "Hey, we increased our conversion rates by 2% by faking notifications. I wonder if this is even legal to trick people to use a service by lying to them there's something they need to attend to.
• VectorLock 7y ago
  >Every other CEO on the planet has the "but the quarterly earnings" boogeyman If you rephrase it as "I want to make as much money as possible" it sounds worse but at its base, thats both what every other CEO and Zuckerberg's real motivations are.
• malloreon 7y ago
  >Every last dark pattern and shady thing they are pushing for with engagement, ultimately, he and he alone is is responsible for and condones. This is absolutely 100% FALSE. Every single person who works on those dark and shady patterns are responsible for their actions. They choose to work for evil every single day because the money is more important to them. Why do we give tech employees a moral and ethical pass for the terrible things they do just because they work for a company? These engineers don't work with blinders on, they know that every line they commit is ultimately in service of getting more people addicted, and more clicks on facebook ads. Someone above them may tell them to write that code, but they choose to write each line when they could be working somewhere else. Last I heard, facebook hires supposedly intelligent people, I daresay they'd be able to to get a job elsewhere. They choose not to.
  • 5trokerac3 7y ago
    The last thing I am is a FB apologist, but your statement belies a lack of understanding of how large tech organizations work. The development process at a company the size of FB is so fragmented that the number of people who actually have a full view of the sum ethics of the platform generally reside at the Director level or higher. Does the engineer who maintains the code for tagging photos with facial recognition know anything about what happens to that data after? Does the person who works on content filtering algorithms know what language rules another person is going to put into them? Does the person working on optimizing databases know who's been given carte blanche access to that data via APIs? To use an extreme comparison, there's a reason the entire German army wasn't hung at Nuremberg.
    • malloreon 7y ago
      My argument is that we are long past the time when an engineer can implement something without thinking about the ethical and moral implications of how their work could be used. And in the case of working at facebook, will most definitely be used.
      • 5trokerac3 7y ago
        I'd never take a job there, but that's different than condemning others who have.
        • zentiggr 7y ago
          I'd say in response to your German Army comparison, what were the options to quit the Landswehr and hire on with another better behaved army? Facebook employees have vastly more options to leave a company that they reasonably know or should know is morally questionable, and quite likely to be able to find other employment. That changes the measures of culpability (or at least compliance) significantly.
          • 5trokerac3 7y ago
• dmitriid 7y ago
  > Every other CEO on the planet has the "but the quarterly earnings" boogeyman In case of Facebook even this doesn’t apply. Facebook’s earnings are steady/growing [1] [1] https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/24/facebook-earnings-q1-2019.html https://www.cnbc.com/2019/04/24/facebook-earnings-q1-2019.ht...
  • celticninja 7y ago
    I think that is the point. He is doing it to increase earnings, he isn't doing it for shareholder benefit, it is for his benefit directly. He could forego some growth in revenue in return for not destroying his users privacy but he, Zuckerberg directly, elects not to.
    • skinnymuch 7y ago
      The stock price would likely tank. Besides being ousted. That’s another reason not to do certain things. Making Zuckerberg into some boogeyman seems over the top.
      • sireat 7y ago
        Pray do tell how would you oust MZ legally? He owns less than 50% of the company but he controls more than 50% of the voting shares. Let's say FB starts losing money or spending it on really useless stuff, sure the secondary stock price could tank, but that might not matter to MZ at some point.
        • skinnymuch 7y ago
          I was responding about how the only concern for a CEO is being ousted. I was giving another reason to potentially not do certain things.
    • garmaine 7y ago
      Increasing profit per share IS in shareholder benefits, no?
• will_brown 7y ago
  >He could unilaterally decide that quarterly profits, hell, any profits, do not matter and there is nothing anyone could do. That’s not entirely accurate, see Henry Ford suspending shareholder dividends, raising employee wages and lowering price of cars for consumers to fulfill vision of every American family owning a (Ford) car. Shareholders sued and won because Ford owed and violated his duty to shareholders. Since that time the Law has evolved to extend director/officer protections - even allowing officers to raid corporate funds to ensure directors re-elect the officers - but The voting rights don’t relieve Zuck of his duties to other shareholders in his capacity as director and/or officer.
  • heymijo 7y ago
    Thank you for correcting me and providing the historical context.
  • pytester 7y ago
    >That’s not entirely accurate, see Henry Ford suspending shareholder dividends, raising employee wages and lowering price of cars for consumers to fulfill vision of every American family owning a (Ford) car. It wasn't to fulfill any kind of dream or vision. Ford didn't like his shareholders, quality was getting hammered by high turnover and he had a weird paternalistic desire to exert more control over his employees (as well as to head off the looming strike threat).
    • deleted 7y ago
      [deleted]
    • vonmoltke 7y ago
      > Ford didn't like his shareholders Specifically, he found out the Dodge brothers were planning to use their gains from Ford stock to start a competitor.
  • jogjayr 7y ago
    > Shareholders sued and won because Ford owed and violated his duty to shareholders. [1] I didn't know about this case so I read about it. It doesn't tell the whole story. "In the 1950s and 1960s, states rejected Dodge repeatedly, in cases including AP Smith Manufacturing Co v. Barlow or Shlensky v. Wrigley. The general legal position today is that the business judgment that directors may exercise is expansive. Management decisions will not be challenged where one can point to any rational link to benefiting the corporation as a whole. " 1. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Dodge_v._Ford_Motor_Co.
• scottlegrand2 7y ago
  So if they dumped all their Facebook stock I wonder how that would affect Zuck? I don't like what Facebook is doing right now either, but I also don't own any Facebook stock. if they choose to continue owning the stock despite his behavior, then aren't they complicit here? I've also floated the notion that if one started putting Zuckerberg deepfake videos on Facebook, I think the thin-skinned tyrant (I mean this is the guy who supposedly threatened employees with a samurai sword in the early days) would suddenly do an about-face about promoting such content.
  • maxlybbert 7y ago
    > So if they dumped all their Facebook stock I wonder how that would affect Zuck? Very few Facebook shareholders bought the stock from Facebook, and virtually none would sell the stock to Facebook. They buy and sell from other investors. It doesn’t matter how much stock I personally have, if I were to sell all of it, it wouldn’t take any money out of Facebook’s bank account. If I sold enough stock to actually affect the price, other investors would buy it at the lower price and bid it back up. Not only would my action have no effect on Facebook, at most I would help other people get the stock at a better price. If you don’t want to own Facebook stock, by all means get rid of it. But don’t expect that to cost Zuckerberg any sleep.
    • scottlegrand2 7y ago
      Great, then clearly your own personal benefit from owning Facebook stock outweighs any of your dignified moral outrage at Zuckerberg's conduct? I suspect that's why big tobacco is still around as well. I have been at multiple big tech companies when the stock dropped 20% or more. These events trigger a flurry of media coverage by analysts declaring that said big tech company's reign is over and soon everything will turn to crap (which it doesn't). But this causes immediate concern among the employees because this directly affects their annual RSU compensation and it causes concern in the leadership because it makes them look bad and they tend to be the sorts that need to look good. IMO don't underestimate what coordinated dumping of Facebook stock could achieve here. It does seem like a bit of a prisoner's dilemma though. After the initial price drop, the stock will recover because Facebook isn't going away anytime soon. So from a pure greed standpoint, don't sell. But that's not what this is about, is it?
• cced 7y ago
  Out if curiosity, what is it that MZ engineered / or accomplished that lead to his current control?
  • sireat 7y ago
    Just your usual "all shares are equal but some shares are more equal than others" dual stock structure that is in vogue these days: Google, Zynga (ahem) and a number of other companies have them. It still boggles the mind that the investors place such a small premium on the right to vote. I am trying to see how one could defend this type of structure. It is the ultimate "having your cake and eating it" deal for the founder. MZ could build a giant money hole with FB money in Antarctica and there is nothing shareholders could do.
    • skewart 7y ago
      Giving the founder control prevents other investors from taking control of the company and doing things that are worse than what the founder would do.
      • sireat 7y ago
        This would be perfectly fine if founder keeps 51% of shares. It should not be possible to have it both ways as a founder: own minority of shares and yet keep the control. You want full control? Then do not dilute yourself. It used to be normal for the founder(s) to have the most (but not the majority) of the shares. See Gates/Allen at Microsoft. This meant that usually shareholder vote went their way, but there was a possibility that you could get ousted. See Jobs at Apple circa 1985. It should not be possible to be the absolute king of a publicly owned company while owning less than 50% of a company.
  • heymijo 7y ago
    Good question. Here's the best summary I found. Note, it's an article from 2012. Search "facebook dual class stock structure" if you want to see much more that has been written on the topic. "A string of voting arrangements outlined in Facebook’s SEC filing show that some of the company’s most powerful shareholders have ceded their voting rights to Zuckerberg, the company’s chief executive. While Zuckerberg only owns 28.2 percent of the Facebook’s shares, the additional “shares subject to voting proxy” gives him an additional 30.6 percent of the voting power, leaving him with a total of 56.9 percent of the shareholder voting power. That gives Zuckerberg full control of the company’s decisionmaking. Under the arrangement, Dustin Moscovitz, Sean Parker, and a host of other Silicon Valley bigwigs have given Zuckerberg “irrevocable proxy” to control their votes. That means that their shares will swing with his shares. Zuckerberg also has irrevocable control over shares held by DST, Greylock, Accel Partners, and other major firms and investors — and the voting rights that go along with those shares — in most circumstances. “This is not common at all,” said Menlo Ventures partner Mark Siegel, who has monitored quite a few IPOs in his time in Silicon Valley and spoke to VentureBeat by phone today. “He negotiated a very unique deal,” said Siegel of Zuckerberg’s coup. While no one knows exactly why Moscovitz, Parker, and a slew of high-powered VC firms would have given up their votes, Siegel speculated, “I’m sure there’s a point where shares were offered with that as a contingency.”" https://venturebeat.com/2012/02/01/zuck-power-play/ https://venturebeat.com/2012/02/01/zuck-power-play/
• cameldrv 7y ago
  That's true, but if he Zuckerberg takes actions that significantly reduce the profitability of Facebook, the stock will go down, and that stock is a significant part of the currency that he pays his employees with. If salaries are cut by a third or more, people will quit and go work somewhere else.
• magduf 7y ago
  Not only this, but these investors had to know, before investing, that Zuck had this control of the company and that they wouldn't get any power at all. So they have no cause to complain.
• Bakary 7y ago
  The more I learn about him, the more he seems to be the closest we have to a Lex Luthor. I'm simultaneously impressed and repelled by his cunning.