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Comment by anigbrowl | Hacker News Reader

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.

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.

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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.

Exactly. If he makes one announcement that he's directionally with Gerstner's shareholder letter [1] the stock will recover.

1 - https://medium.com/@alt.cap/time-to-get-fit-an-open-letter-f...

> Zuckerberg is playing a long game here

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.

> I can't remember the last time the firm produced anything interesting on the product side

Quest 2, which has outsold Xbox Series X|S?

Bringing E2EE to the masses via WhatsApp?

Turning Instagram from some niche hipster pictures app to one of the biggest social platforms in the world?

All three of those were acquisitions, which seems to sorta prove the point.

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.

Might be a good time to go back to one share one vote corporate structure.

You can choose to invest in companies with that structure and others can choose to invest in other structures...

The CEO is still the chief executive. Share voting rights do not control day to day business decisions or even strategy.

you can replace the CEO

Do you have someone in mind for meta? Or just change in general?

who should be the CEO is besides the point, certainly many more talented and driven people out there

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.

This.

Show me an investor complaining about Facebook’s corporate governance

And I’ll show you someone who doesn’t think investment decisions through

Sounds like if they are complaining, they've thought it through...

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.

There is protection for minority shareholders.

I'm not sure the extent but majority owners/majority voters can't loot the company.

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