4 ms·
It seems a lot of people posting here don't realize that Mark Zuckerberg owns a majority of the voting power of FB's board through his shares. Nobody can fire
by AlchemistCamp 4y ago
It seems a lot of people posting here don't realize that Mark Zuckerberg owns a majority of the voting power of FB's board through his shares.
Nobody can fire him unless he votes with them to do it.
- protastus 4y agoYes, agreed. Further, this has always been the case, and it's been discussed since the Facebook IPO. The rules of the game are clear. Someone who doesn't like this game is free to walk away and do something else (most public companies don't have a CEO with majority voting power). Complaining without acknowledging the rules seems like misdirected energy.
- makestuff 4y agoYeah snap has a similar voting structure. A quick search says that the cofounders have 96% of the voting power.
- rvz 4y agoExactly. The author should do some reading on Facebook's share ownership structure and come back to tell their readers on who owns the majority of the voting power and then just delete this entire article; since honestly, I stopped reading when I read the title. Good luck on "Fire Mark Zuckerberg" without his 'say so', unless he does it himself.
- praisewhitey 4y agoFourth sentence of the article: >This is not a plucky startup founder or a journeyman finding his feet, but a guy who has the majority of voting power in a publicly-traded trillion-dollar enterprise who is giving a “forgot to prepare for this meeting” style speech.
- userforcomment 4y agoThis. Owning ~20% of normal stocks and ~60% of voting stocks shouldn't be allowed for public company. At some point company becomes just CEO's toy to do things they want, in this case "metaverse".
- fdsvalkj 4y agoWhy not? Nobody put a gun to anybody's head and made them invest in META. Arguably there's forced investment by index fund holders but now the SP500 eschews companies with that structure, so even index investors can avoid this sort of thing.
- djkivi 4y agoApparently the S&P 500 rule is recently changed: https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/indexnews/announcements/20230417-1463543/1463543_prapril20231500shareclassconsultresults.pdf https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/indexnews/announ...
- dslkjvalkj2 4y agoOh! Well that weakens my point then doesn't it.
- djkivi 4y agoIt came as a shock to learn this for me too! I thought it was a good rule when they introduced it a few years ago.
- DANmode 4y agoAny summary for those who don't execute random PDFs? Thanks.
- Salgat 4y agoI'd argue that no single person should have that much power and wealth in this country. Why is it okay that Zuckerberg has absolute power over one of the most influential companies in the world? How does that benefit society as a whole?
- 1lint 4y agoHe elects a majority of the board members through his shares. In fact, the board can indeed fire him even if he (as a member of the board) votes against the rest of the board. I wouldn't characterize the current board as being Mark loyalists https://investor.fb.com/leadership-and-governance/?section=board https://investor.fb.com/leadership-and-governance/?section=b.... Even as a controlling shareholder, the ex-CEO could take months to go through the process of nominating new board members and holding a shareholder election according to the corporate bylaws before his new hand-picked board members could hire him back.