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Comment by profalseidol | Hacker News Reader

Majority Shareholders are practically our Modern Feudal Lords. The only difference is that there is a government which was paid in blood as result from past revolutions and uprisings. A government that is also being taken over by Modern Aristocrats.

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Amazon doesn't have a majority shareholder. Most of these huge companies don't. Gates doesn't own a majority of Microsoft, Page and Brin even together don't own a majority of Google, etc. These companies are owned by everybody's retirement fund.

It's actually becoming rather a problem because you have these gigantic containers of wealth but there is no one captaining the ship who can do anything bold with it, because that requires shareholder approval but the underlying shareholders don't even know what companies they own much less have any idea what comes up for a vote. Meanwhile the fund managers are the most conservative people imaginable and are far more interested in stable returns than making the world a better place, so the entities that have the resources for moonshots don't have the stones to actually attempt them.

Your comment is incorrect. There are numerous types of stock. The biggest division being preferred and common. Common entails voting rights, preferred does not. There are also share classes. For instance Google has class A, B, C shares. Class A are what people buy and do entail minimal voting rights. Class B are voting shares owned primarily by the founders and carry 10x the voting rights per share of class A. And class C are voteless shares generally distributed to employees for compensation. Sergey Brin and Larry Page own a minority of all outstanding Google shares (about 13%) but have majority control of the voting power in the company. The same is true of companies such as Facebook and Zuckerberg.

This leads to the rather interesting insight that the current direction and actions of of Alpha/Google/YouTube etc have been ultimately under the exclusive control of Brin and Page; similarly for Zuckerberg/Facebook. These companies' actions give the most honest insight possible into their owners' worldviews. Not the most comforting thought.

Recent tech companies notoriously have voting rights concentrated among founder-executives; that is very much against the norm for the majority of public companies, where CEOs can actually be fired / replaced by the board.

Zuck/Brin/Page's argument was that their tech visionary abilities deserved special protection to take risks others don't see. You're seeing a lot of investors dispute that increasingly. And that argument has no traction at all in more mature industries where senior management is more of an actual management role, serving as employees of the board.

While you're broadly right about the legal authority, keep in mind that the founders can't do most things themselves and at a large corporation, can't even monitor most of what's going on themselves. Getting a large bureaucracy to do something complicated is not as easy as sending out an email. (The most obvious case of this is stopping leaks, which is not as easy as the CEO saying "don't leak stuff".) They can set OKR's but whether they get done or not isn't guaranteed.

Matt Levine occasionally writes about amusing corner cases where corporate governance gets metaphysical [1].

I would guess that Google and Facebook might not have turned out quite like the founders had hoped, though of course they have more power than anyone to turn things around.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/articles/2018-05-24/compan...

Is there a price difference? Can shares be converted between classes or between preferred and common?

I'm not much of a stock person, but I think in such cases, the voting shares tend to be tightly controlled. Especially for companies like Alphabet & Facebook, they are essentially trying to get the funding of a public company, while still maintaining the function of a private one.

Yes! We built this site to try and educate retail shareowners and encourage them to take action with their shareowner rights.

Fundamentally, we believe it's unrealistic to expect them to pay attention, so we're trying to build an experience where they sync their accounts, demonstrate what they care about, and then we pay attention for them via push notifications. Would love to hear your feedback! www.yourstake.org.

> Meanwhile the fund managers are the most conservative people imaginable and are far more interested in stable returns than making the world a better place, so the entities that have the resources for moonshots don't have the stones to actually attempt them.

You have actually given another premise to my argument. The world's resources (represented in paper money) is not being used to benefit the world, if fact, it's being used to lobby gov't to remove subsidies on renewable energy.

Feudal lords own the land just like today's capitalists (especially the whales) own capital.

Cascading corporatization (companies owned by companies owned by funds, owned by shareholders owned by other entities) breaks all sorts of things. Governance is a big one. The idea of "shareholder ownership" is fairly theoretical, in most cases.. both the concept of "shareholder" and "ownership" need a lot of qualification.

"6 people own a share of a bookshop" isn't really an analogy.

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