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Comment by dkokelley | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, pressure from people who have authority to fire you. I don't think that's the case for Zuckerberg.

"Even after the IPO, Zuckerberg remains Facebook's single largest shareholder, with 503.6 million shares. And he controls the company with 56 percent of its voting stock." (http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/47491836/ns/business/)

Does anyone know what sort of recourse the minority shareholders and the other 44% voting holders have if Mark runs the company into the ground?

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Well, he still has fiduciary responsibility to the shareholders, so they can sue him if he does something clearly stupid.

Given how long such lawsuits take, it will of course be too late by then.

Err... is it normal for there to be recourse? If you do not have a controlling interest, you do not have control. That's that. If you aren't comfortable with that, sell.

Shareholders may bring suit against an officer on behalf of a company. It is designed to protect minority investors against exactly the scheme Zuck has set up. The corporation is the benefactor of any damages to prevent abuse by shareholders.

See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Derivative_suit

Pretty sure he's not planning on running it into the ground.

No on said he did. Nobody plans on running companies into the ground.

It still occurs with unsurprising regularity. Lots of interesting books out there which talk about why.

Unfortunately people do plan to run companies into the ground (usually so they can exit the smoking shell with a fat profit) which is why these laws are necessary.

that depends. to the ground financially? if ads click-through wont progress and they wont find mobile revenue model, it will be extremely hard for Zuck to keep users happy AND keep this operation running (financially, that is).

Zero. http://www.slate.com/articles/business/moneybox/2012/02/face...

AFAIK just sell out and tank the price.

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