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Facebook Shareholders Force A Vote On Ousting Mark Zuckerberg (businessinsider.com)
On May 30th, Facebook's shareholder's will vote on whether to remove Mark Zuckerberg as chairman of the board, reports Business Insider:
Business Insider broke the news of the proposal in July last year after revealing the plans of activist shareholder Trillium Asset Management, which had grown tired of the "mishandling" of scandals including the Cambridge Analytica data breach. Responding to the proposal in the SEC filing, Facebook called on investors to vote it down. "We believe our board of directors is functioning effectively under its current structure, and that the current structure provides appropriate oversight protections," Facebook said...
The chance of it becoming a reality is extremely slim, despite it being backed by investors that control around $3 billion of Facebook stock. A similar proposal in 2017 was popular among independent investors but was crushed because of Zuckerberg's voting power. This is because of Facebook's dual-class share structure. Class B shares have 10 times the voting power of class A shares, and it just so happens that Zuckerberg owns more than 75% of class B stock. It means he has more than half of the voting power at Facebook....
Facebook will almost certainly get its way. But the two investor proposals mark continued dissatisfaction among shareholders about the way Facebook is run following a year from hell for the company. It also shows that investors continue to believe that Zuckerberg has too much power.
The chance of it becoming a reality is extremely slim, despite it being backed by investors that control around $3 billion of Facebook stock. A similar proposal in 2017 was popular among independent investors but was crushed because of Zuckerberg's voting power. This is because of Facebook's dual-class share structure. Class B shares have 10 times the voting power of class A shares, and it just so happens that Zuckerberg owns more than 75% of class B stock. It means he has more than half of the voting power at Facebook....
Facebook will almost certainly get its way. But the two investor proposals mark continued dissatisfaction among shareholders about the way Facebook is run following a year from hell for the company. It also shows that investors continue to believe that Zuckerberg has too much power.
Too much power? It's his company, and yours to choose whether to invest in it or not. Now I despise FB and everything it stands for as much as the next guy, but good on Zuck for having retained a controlling interest in his company. Maybe I've seen too much of the other extreme, with VCs asking for too large a piece of the pie in exchange for a pittance.
If construction was anything like programming, an incorrectly fitted lock would bring down the entire building...
you could just... you know... invest in another company if you don't like that one.
Holding 3 billion of stock with basically no decision rights. That's a cute position to be in. How greedy do you have to be?
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
slim.
Class B shares have 10 times the voting power of class A shares, and it just so happens that Zuckerberg owns more than 75% of class B stock.
Right, I'm sure he'll just oust himself. This is news why? Because Trillium Asset Management is bored?
Trillium Money Grabbers more like. I'm no fan of facebook - don't use it - or zuckerberg, but its his baby, he created the company and these parasites have him to thank for the increasing value of their investments. If they don't like it they're free to take their dirty gold elsewhere.
How has the scandal been mishandled? It looks like a textbook response of attempting to avoid and shift all blame while doing the bare minimum to appease 3rd parties.
What do they prefer? Full ownership and action? That is the BP / VW way (except for the action bit) and is now a case study in business textbooks of what not to do.
This is just some kind of grandstanding. Even if Zuckerburg didn't have the controlling shares to stop this I think other key share holders would stop him from being ousted. Despite all the main stream media hate I think Zuckerburg has handled the "scandals" pretty well and most shareholders know this.
Why would any sane investor do that except at a substantial discount?
Because most investors are interested in making money, and not in "having a say".
I have never, not once, cast a vote for a board member or sent in a proxy form. I just toss them in the trash. So why should I care if I have voting rights, when I don't exercise them?
Imagine what investor-centric FB would look like. Maximum ads, maximum data selling, maximum profiling. As much as I dislike Zuck and everything he stands for, I think opening floodgates to predatory capitalism on this isn't going to improve things.
Cambridge Analytica wasn't a data breach.
Every piece of data they gathered was allowed by the site rules
Trillium is an activist investor, in this case "activist" meaning they want to push their social agenda on corporations.
Why would the shareholders hold any votes if a single person has over half the votes?
Troll is not a replacement for I disagree.
Why should America have nuclear bombs if it doesn't launch them?
And on the other side, many things in this world that can't presently be fixed could be fixed if fewer people took your attitude. It still wouldn't be a panacea, but it would be better.
Nothing good comes from punters sleeping on their powers, however small. Good decisions generally derive from high engagement of all stakeholders, and not so much from round-file target practice. If everyone made it their business to take their small responsibilities seriously, it would tilt how the initial share offerings were structured in the first place.
The other vantage point, I suppose, is that tyranny knows best: that tightly held control is a feature not a bug. This is a serious empirical question. It could actually be a locally superior strategy to invest in corporations where the control rests primary in a despotic overlord likes Gates, Ellison, or Zuckerberg who really couldn't give a shit how their behaviour impacts society, so long as the enterprise grows. It's also true in game theory that locally superior often equates to globally nasty. This is the central lesson of prisoner's dilemma: I make a higher rate of return by buying shares in a tyrannical corporation, but if we all do the same, then everybody wallows in collective cynicism about how every corporation and public institution seems to be primarily in the business of making shit flow downhill.
What ethnographers have discovered is that in some racially homogeneous western democracies (primarily Scandinavia), that the pendulum sometimes tips the other direction: they look around and say "hey, we're all pretty much the same here; why should we all conspire to make shit flow downhill for a 0.1% higher rate of financial return in the short run?"
Back in America, this isn't the dominant thought process. Everyone is struggling for a buck, and no-one sneezes at an extra 0.1% in the short run. But then the collective mass of shit flowing downhill causes the collective outcome to not be so great after all, and people are angry, because they thought they had successfully sold their souls for that extra 0.1%, and everything was going to be great again, and now even the devil has reneged on the deal.
The human capacity for explanation tends to run in reverse. Most of our psychological justifications are retconned.
What can the mind summon up to buttress the ego after losing the game of prisoner's dilemma on a grand scale? Social parasites. It would have all worked out exactly as planned, but for the parasites sucking the social tit dry. Where do social parasites incubate? They're the losers kicked to the curb in a world run by the Gateses, and Ellisons and Zuckerbergs. Now, the losers will get kicked to the curb in pretty much any system, but there's a huge difference in the harshness of the curb they land on.
The general idea on the right is that the harsher the curb, the more people will fear landing on the curb, and the less it will happen.
Empirical evidence does not bear this out. Actual human behaviour when nearing a curb of no recovery is to double down on high risk behaviour. People don't become more responsible; what they do instead is pull their goaltender, and hope to save their sorry ass by some minor miracle with an extra attacker on the ice in the final minute. Of course, this only works out in a minority of situations. Some of these people do go on to regain their status in the productive middle class. But more go on to be twice as hopeless, and twice as desperate, with half as many viable options remaining to pick themselves back up again.
So you can't afford physiotherapy for that pain in your wrist after you were downsized? But you do finally land another job in the industry six months later, of hustling hard in the gig economy, only now that pain in your wrist is chronic instead of transient. What doesn'
Hey Zuck, WTF do you think shares are? They are shares of ownership which means you get a say in how the company is run. Don't like that? Form a partnership and give up on the lucrative opportunity to exchange ownership for money.
SJW n. One who posts facts.