Anyone who invested in Facebook directly (rather than via a managed or exchange-traded fund of some sort) did so with the expected awareness that all the voting stock was controlled by Zuckerberg personally. Effectively, FB is a corporate dictatorship and it's hard to have sympathy for people who put money into it during the good times and are now surprised to discover that they made a bad investment decision.
Suing Zuckerberg on the basis that FB has made the world a worse place is one thing, suing him on the basis that a corporate dictatorship has disrupted their portfolio is a joke. They'd be better off suing the SEC or FTC for failure to regulate effectively.
It’s not even clear yet whether this has been a bad investment decision. Zuckerberg is playing a long game here, and the market is notoriously short-term, immediate-profits-driven. Long term investors may actually be quite pleased if this strategy turns out to be generation-defining. Obviously no person can say this with certainty, but they can see his track record — he’s gone against the grain on many occasions, at the peril of short term holders, only to dramatically increase the overall profits of the company exponentially.
He may have legs, but I'm not the same can be said of his strategy. While I give FB credit for things like Pytorch and other innovations, I can't remember the last time the firm produced anything interesting on the product side. I only maintain an FB account because of a few friends and family members who use it as their preferred platform.
The Quest 2 was not an acquisition. Oculus was an acquisition. Then, over 6 years later, the Quest 2 was released. Not sure anyone can claim that FB didn't have a huge role in inventing the Quest 2 after 6 years of building up to it.
I’ve got both Quests. The 2 is nice, but it’s not very different from the first gen; upped specs and resolution. The first gen was nice; separating it from the PC was important, but it’s still hard to see it as that innovative over the Rift predecessor it largely inherited from.
“We never expected the leopards to eat our faces!” say investors in Face-Eating-Leopards inc.
Basically this is investors saying they are concerned that they are having to bear some of the externalized costs of Facebook’s business.
Traditionally, businesses have been more careful to target those externalities at folks in the third world, or at the very least in poor parts of the state, and avoided impacting the investing classes.
I think highly accountable tech CEOs with experience managing large organizations, and executing long term visions, are in shorter supply than you suggest.
But to bring it back to the context here. The shareholders can fire a CEO, but he runs the company. If you don't know who that person should be, or what traits they should have differently, I don't think it would be that valuable to have voting rights.
Largely agreed. The normal way for shareholders to express their distaste for choices made by the board/executive is to vote them out. Shareholders here literally can't do so, but they've known that from the day they bought their shares.
https://www.morningstar.com/articles/1061237/how-facebook-si...
Suing Zuckerberg on the basis that FB has made the world a worse place is one thing, suing him on the basis that a corporate dictatorship has disrupted their portfolio is a joke. They'd be better off suing the SEC or FTC for failure to regulate effectively.