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Comment by davnicwil | Hacker News Reader

> While it may seem impossible to drive a $500 billion company into the ground, I firmly believe he’s the man for the job

It may be a controversial take, but, like... if he does that's fine. It's his prerogative and risk to take.

He built that $500B company. Its existence is primarily due to him. He still owns the majority of it. He calls the shots on what that company does, that is the end of it.

At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?

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> At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?

At the point where the machine that is built starts having very real external effects.

Facebook has been used for artificially amplifying some incredibly extremist social movements.

It is a reasonable expectation to put some limits on that in the same way that we would want to put some limits on say… a family owned pharma company that actively encouraged doctors to prescribe addictive drugs.

> we would want to put some limits on... a family owned pharma company that actively encouraged doctors to prescribe addictive drugs.

I mean we'd probably want to do this even if the pharma company were not family owned...

FYI This was a reference to the Sacklers who own Purdue who did exactly what is described

TikTok, Youtube, Twitter does the same.

Even Youtube premium, where I'm supposed to be the customer, I feel like advertisers and content creators are treated better than me, and I'm not being served (youtube shorts, and lots of clickbait that I can't turn off are pushed on me...all it would take is a simple clickbait sentiment analyzer).

Him running Meta to the ground may be his greatest contribution to the world.

The rate at which is gives teenagers depression is enough of a reason, imo. There's broad consensus this stuff is detrimental to young people's mental health. Facebook claiming otherwise is akin the Philip Moris company testifying in congress that it's actually completely normal for a baby to be born with a small head.

> ...akin [to] the Philip Moris company testifying...

Indeed. If only there were some analogy to a massively profitable industry, woven into the social fabric of the country, that was then found to be harmful.

Why, you'd expect that said industry would fight tooth and nail against regulation, perhaps stringing things out for decades...

For those who weren't there, two things were simultaneously true in the 80s, 90s, and 00s: (1) we knew beyond a shadow of a doubt cigarettes gave people cancer & (2) we still had smoking sections right next to non-smoking ones, throughout businesses of all sorts.

All because it was too hard to change, and there were too many addicts to make a change.

... before ultimately yielding to the weight of scientific evidence against it. But not before killing people who didn't have to die if they'd heeded warnings earlier and pivoted.

Or, you know, this could be a completely different scenario, and Meta could be acting out of altruism with its users best interests at heart.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=3wUZvOEGm8c

You make an interesting point. I initially do think there is a scale where someone should not be allowed to just destroy something just because it's theirs. In the same way the US government has eminent domain to stop someone from hoarding land that serves the greater good, I think there needs to be a similar process for a corporation that is has more influence than many countries. I don't think Facebook is necessarily there or doing something bad enough to warrant anything like that, but I do think that threshold exists where the people can say "thanks for this incredibly valuable thing, but your right to destroy it is significantly less important the benefit we receive from it so we'll take it from here." For example, what if Google just said "we're tired. We're deleting all your emails and documents and websites and domains and we're closing down tomorrow." Shouldn't someone be able to step in and say that you don't get to destroy so much value for absolutely no reason?

> In the same way the US government has eminent domain to stop someone from hoarding land that serves the greater good

Governments use eminent domain when they want to do something with your land, it's not been used to take it just because someone has a lot of it - and I think that might go against all the case law, but IANAL.

But all that said, I don't think the government should be in the business of picking winners and losers - no one can tell if a gambit is a good idea or a bad one until it pays off or fails spectacularly.

The alternative here is nationalization, and I don't think the government should be in the business of nationalizing the tech industry either.

Let's be clear - while Zuck has the majority voting rights(does he?), he isn't the majority owner.

But even if he was, his decisions would impact the minority owners... and we have had cases, where devaluing minority shareholder value has been deemed illegal.

Imagine that you're in a co-op building and the majority vote owner decides to demolish the building...

They just did exactly that, to my Google Voice account, around 6 months ago.

> He built that $500B company. Its existence is primarily due to him. He still owns the majority of it. He calls the shots on what that company does, that is the end of it.

If we transpose this to the medieval period, you could say the same thing about many kings who built their kingdoms by invading their neighbours. The problem, as others have pointed out, is that the number of stakeholders is huge. Some people make their living on Meta's platform so his decisions can have far-reaching consequences.

I would argue that Meta should never have been allowed to get this big in the first place. Allowing the Instagram and WhatsApp acquisitions was a mistake.

Terrible analogy. An invasion is a violent act of force, creating a popular website is not.

> Some people make their living on Meta's platform

That's their own prerogative, nobody forced them to do that.

Creating a popular website by ignoring IP rules and cultural and social norms, and misrepresenting what you do and how it works may not be a "violent act of force," per se, but it's absolutely something that can be criticized and punished.

I mean, I don’t know where you’d draw the hard line in terms of user count, but it’s definitely somewhere before half of the human race.

Once that many people use your products I would argue there is a moral imperative to do right by those people. Yes, at that scale, people other than the original builder/owner do have the right to make demands.

If the human race finally ever takes such an outward interest in software, there's plenty of open source and decentralized ways they can use to link up.

Facebook is only a public utility as long as we allow it to be.

There's onus on them because of that — but also on us.

Time for us to stop ignoring our part.

That's why things like www.touchbase.id exist - to make it easier to find the online presence of someone that THEY want to share - so you're not stuck defaulting to the big platforms, or ignorant to the other places they're using.

> Facebook is only a public utility as long as we allow it to be.

Facebook won't take opposition lying down. Consider their free internet offerings in some countries. How is open source going to compete with that? And what service will you use to organize a movement large enough to upend Facebook? Twitter? Mastodon?

>> At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?

This is a pretty weird take. Do you apply the same logic to citizens of a country? I mean, they're just one vote, what right do they have to make demands of a country they only joined 20/30/50/70 years ago? Meta isn't some plucky little privately held startup. Vanguard, Blackrock and Fidelity combined own more than Zuckerberg, and those funds are primarily the savings of individuals and pension plans, so I think people do have legitimate grounds to make demands. He's maintained control without ownership, and I think this makes him extra worthy of criticism. He's highly leveraged and gambling with far more than his own outcome.

> He still owns the majority of it

Not quite, although he controls the majority of votes due to the controversial dual class shares. Owning shares in Meta/Facebook is really owning shares in Zuckerberg Inc. He has total control, your share ownership means nothing. Investing in Meta is nothing other than an investment in him and his management.

This is a relatively unusual situation (although Google was similar) and I believe the SEC don't like these structures and they don't really happen anymore.

Most other company's don't have these absurd structures and so an investor has a right to an opinion. So while I agree with the parent in relation to Meta, it is not a normal situation, and it not "right".

> Facebook has Class A shares and Class B shares. Investors hold Class A shares, but Mark Zuckerberg holds Class B shares, which have 10 votes each. His shares represent roughly 14% of Facebook's economic ownership but control nearly 60% of the voting rights.

https://www.wyrick.com/news-insights/what-is-a-dual-class-st...

> the SEC don't like these structures

Standard & Poors doesn't either, apparently. Companies with dual classes of stock cannot be admitted to the S&P 500.

They may be changing their minds:

https://www.spglobal.com/spdji/en/documents/indexnews/announ...

Interesting, that's the S&P 1500. Do you think the 500 is next?

OP’s point still stands. If people invested in him to the tune of $500b, then they gave him enough rope to hang everyone with. They knew the rules when they decided to play the game.

A lot of retail investors will be unlikely to understand the nuance of the situation with Meta/Facebook. I don't blame them for investing and finding themselves with no voice. Institutional investors should know better than accept these ownership structures.

The structure an interesting nuance but I was just being succinct. I meant he owns the control of the company, which is all that matters in the end.

It’s a public company. Yes, I know he still owns the majority of it so it’s not like he’s violating the law by grinding it into the ground but still. It’s woven into the fabric of modern life for better or worse (worse) and I think it’s fair to write an article saying “This man is doing a bad job running it”.

He owns about 14% of it. He has a majority of the voting stock, and presumably so will his heir. But most of the company is owned by someone else.

I was about to respond that there is no way the class B stock could be passed down to an heir with 10x voting rights attached, but after reading the documentation it does. So his family could run it into the ground at their leisure! Though Mark would have the ability to convert it from class B to class A when passing the stock down if he wanted.

> most of the company is owned by someone else.

Absolutely correct, but…

> He has a majority of the voting stock, and presumably so will his heir.

Which is what counts, in terms of being able to push through his ideas of where/how the company should (try to) move.

This also highlights an extreme imbalance between ability to do great harm and bearing the brunt of said harm.

When someone else owns a majority of voting shares of the company they get to make demands of how it's run.

Unfortunately for regular investors in Facebook, their shares are each worth 1/10th of the votes of Zuckerberg's special Class B shares, and if they wanted to have a say in anything they probably should've invested in a company where the CEO/founder doesn't hold a huge pile of special voting shares.

He built it alone? Just him? Why does he need so many tens of thousands of employees then? Just because I initiate something doesn't mean I fully own it.

Didn't all of those employees get compensated for their effort? Many of them quite handsomely?

Didn't he?

IF you happen to hold a controlling interest, then yes, you would own it. The other people were hired help.

Zuck has the singular moral obligation to pile drive Meta deep into the earth.

Spectacularly.

To such a degree as to trigger a permanent social media winter. Dragging the parade of freemium, attention economy, dopamine hacking, panopticon, and manufactured outrage biz models down too.

Dorsey cowardly delegated that task to Musk. Which is probably for the best; like with all his manias, Musk will go above and beyond anything Dorsey could imagine, much less managed.

Any nominations for antihero(s) to warp TikTok into the sun?

It's not controversial. It's just factually wrong.

Public company has different rules than private company. He now has fiduciary duty to other owners. It's true that he has locked in majority of votes, but that's only because Meta has dual class structure.

It's unfortunate that it's possible to build this kind of monstrosities with dual class stocks.

Why are dual class stocks allowed if they are so clearly wrong? Also why do investors buy into companies which have dual class stocks if they are bad?

A sick obsession with founder-centric companies thanks to the myth of lone geniuses fueled by industry hero worship of folks like Gates and Jobs.

Fortunately, thanks to the flailings of folks like Musk, Zuck, and Holmes, that fever has broken and the sickness is starting to pass...

Everybody who bought the non voting stock did so voluntarily, understanding the structure before doing so.

> voluntarily

unless they were doing so through an index fund like a significant majority of public capital

> understanding the structure

I would bet against every Facebook shareholder understanding at the time of investment; I would bet against even a majority thinking through the long-term ramifications

I understand your point — it’s a free market, nobody MAKES you buy stock — but I still don’t think it’s a reason to totally write off all the implications of a dual-class share structure for one of the biggest companies in the world.

> He built that $500B company.

He did have a bit of help along the way. Even if their contributions were smaller, it's sick to pretend they're zero.

> He still owns the majority of it.

AIUI he owns the majority of the voting rights but not of the total shares. He still has a duty to act in the interests of the shareholders as a group, and can be sued if he does not. Beyond the merely legal to the moral, he has duties to other stakeholders as well, and to society.

> At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?

"Your right to swing your fist ends at my nose." Others contributed. Others are affected. Those facts give them some right, however small, to make such demands. The only situation in which someone has sole right to make every possible decision is an utter vacuum. Does he or the company operate in a vacuum?

At the extreme, the demise of Microsoft would trigger an immediate and prolonged crisis response to everyone whose IT systems depend on it (i.e. essentially everyone, either directly or indirectly), both on-prem and for cloud services. At some point it is less about who owns the tree, and more about how much of the forest it will take down with it if the owner shows up and chops it down.

Facebook is not exactly at Microsoft scale on this, but it would still require an enormous about of human effort to reconstitute all the organizations, event planning infrastructure, relationships etc. that people currently manage via IG and Facebook.

"At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?"

Well, presumably the point when they no longer own it and turn it into a public company with shareholders that are going to go down with the $500b ship.

A quick google says that Mark owns 13.4%, not a majority of the company.

So he has a pretty large voice and might be the largest single shareholder but it's no longer his -- it's not his prerogative or risk to take, if the board decides it's not. And there's a good argument that the board should replace him.

> So he has a pretty large voice and might be the largest single shareholder but it's no longer his -- it's not his prerogative or risk to take, if the board decides it's not. And there's a good argument that the board should replace him.

Zuckerberg has over 50% of the voting rights, which means he controls the board of directors.

>At what point of scale do people start imagining they have a right to make demands on how something somebody else built and owns should be run?

Zuck still has a fiduciary duty to his shareholders, who expect a return on their investment. Running Meta into the ground because of his own hubris is not acceptable behavior from the CEO of a publicly traded company.

Frankly, I think Facebook burning to the ground would be a net positive for society. Let the man keep doing his thing.

He didn't build that company, him and thousands of talented professionals built that company to where it is now. I'm not saying his contributions weren't a major part of that, but lets not act like he alone made this happen and this company is his alone to destroy, including all those jobs.

And beyond prerogative, it's pretty clear at worst he's wandering his way down. "Driving down" would look more like what is going on at the other blue social media company.

> He built that $500B company. Its existence is primarily due to him.

Sheryl Sandberg, the person responsible for actually making Facebook profitable, would like to have a word...

Minority shareholders still have rights to good governance... so yes... they can make these demands, but are unlikely to prevail.

Maybe he is trying to establish a grand sweeping narrative arc, like the rise, decline, and eventual fall of the Roman empire

Wanted to write the great American novel but settled for role playing it instead.

A very good starting point would be when it started harming people. This is not a difficult question.

That's not how a public company is supposed to work. Once Mark sold a single share of the company to someone else, he is obligated to make the business successful.

Fiduciary duty is not an obligation to make the business successful; it is an obligation to do what you think is in the best interests of shareholders.

In other words, to TRY to make it successful, but failure still exists in this world.

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