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Facebook Shareholders Urge Company To Replace Mark Zuckerberg With 'Independent' Board Chair (venturebeat.com)
An anonymous reader shares a VentureBeat report: Facebook is being pressured by a group of shareholders seeking the removal of company chief executive Mark Zuckerberg from the board of the directors. A proposal has been put forward claiming that an independent chairperson would be better able to "oversee the executives of the company, improve corporate governance, and set a more accountable, pro-shareholder agenda." The idea for Zuckerberg's board ousting comes from Facebook shareholders who are members of the consumer watchdog group SumOfUs. The organization bills itself as an online community that campaigns to hold corporations accountable on a variety of global issues such as climate change, workers' rights, discrimination, human rights, corruption, and corporate power grab.
Third party organization wants to oust founder of company from board of directors because of their activism in the area of "power grab."
Don't disappoint your bird dog. Go to the range.
This can be read as "businesses should focus on their employees and their customers, not their owners".
Now, explain why, exactly, someone should buy part of a business if they're not going to get some benefit from doing so....
"I do not agree with what you say, but I will defend to the death your right to say it"
Yup. Any agenda put forth by share holders with political goals in mind should be shut down hard.
Being political with your business is a great way to win over the worst kinds of customers, tick off governments, and offend/lose your core user base.
How about Facebook sticks to being a social network?
"pro-shareholder agenda"
and
"global issues such as climate change, workers' rights, discrimination, human rights, corruption"
seem like seriously conflicting goals.
The end users of Facebook are not the "owners" or even the "Customers" for that matter. They are the product.
That's not really true. They just want to get 'some' power. The problem with many of these new unicorn tech businesses is that buying a share does not give you any useful voting rights in the company's operation. People like zuck hold share classes that basically means he can out vote everyone even though he doesn't own much of the business. This isn't really healthy and has set a precedent which many other tech companies are all to happy to follow.
You might say that nobody has to buy the shares. That's true, but again, I don't think this is something we want to see become the norm, which is what is happening now. It's a bit like when govts pass surveillance laws for a specific situation, and when people complain they say 'hey it's not going to affect you, it's just this special case, don't worry' and then ten years later they are using those laws to keep the population in check. These super share classes are fine when the companies act like regular companies, but as soon as it is widespread, there are just so many ways in which the unicorns can screw their shareholders, it could get really really nasty.
You also have to wonder whether it would be healthy to end up in a situation where 70% of the shareholders cannot stop the CEO from doing something they all don't want him to do. Because that is really the only situation where Zuckerberg needs his super shares, so what does he think he might want to do that would require this sort of power?
Personally, I think markets need counterbalancing forces, and this is one of them, even though it will probably fail.
Sounds like some people with a political agenda want control of the largest social network on the planet. Sounds like a bad idea to me. While Mark may lean left, at least he is driven by the dollar and has at least publicly expressed his interest in keeping facebook as a site independent.
99% of the people who signed the request aren't shareholders, and 99% of shareholders didn't sign the request. The overlap between this third-party group and Facebook shareholders is small. Since there *are* a few people in both groups, they were able to officially file the proposal.
In just the last three months, there have been 23 million purchases of Facebook stock. That's probably fairly close to the number of Facebook stockholders - tens of millions. 1500 are part of this activist group.
Start a competitor and put him out of business, like Zuck put MySpace and Friendster out of business.
Oh wait. That's what a serious person willing to back up his mouth with action would do. Not you.