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Comment by cdolan | Hacker News Reader

It’s not uncommon, from my understanding, for founders/families to have almost all of the voting control in a public company. I think it’s a misplaced assumption that the public has a proportional interest in voting equal to their amount of shares, or % ownership.

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It’s not uncommon today, but was virtually unheard of until Google did it.

Yes it was. See Newspapers/media barons.

Which ones?

New York Times is a good example:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_New_York_Times#Ochs-Sulzbe...

NYT is big one that I know, but others include:

News Corp, Sinclair, WaPo, NYT

Other media companies in general.

Ford.

Weren't those usually private companies?

> It’s not uncommon, from my understanding, for founders/families to have almost all of the voting control in a public company.

Less than 1% of public stocks in the US have that arrangement. It's extremely uncommon.

Among public companies with market caps above $5 billion, there are extraordinarily few stocks in which founders/families have almost all of the voting power. You can count them on one hand.

I don't understand why it isn't illegal.

Because if you don't like the idea you don't have to by the security.

And, as it happens, so many people own equities passively (through a managed mutual fund, or an index fund, retirement account and the like) and ownership of a company is so diffuse, these provisions have little impact in practice except against another large entity.

I'm not defending the practice -- I think it is a bad management practice myself and don't buy stocks with such provisions -- I'm simply responding to your comment.

Wall St. hasn't punished most tech stock prices for this practice (yet). Seems to be an unspoken rule that when it comes to tech companies, the founders know more than the street analysts.

Yes they have! [1] Dual- class listing now miss out in huge daily price-insensitive purchases from ETFs driving their stock up.

[1] https://www.ft.com/content/993e4c11-8729-3168-a280-69e1d400b...

In a phrase, "because it's a free country".

I would argue that its publicly available information so why should it be? Anyone who knows this in advance and still buys the stock is making a (theoretically) informed choice to give up control for a share of profits (hopefully). It's all part of the risk calculation in investing.

Because there is zero reason why it should be. You can get this information before you make your decision to buy.

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