Comment by HerbManic | Hacker News Reader

Comment by HerbManic | Hacker News Reader

Parent Full thread

That is a part of it.

Think of it like security backed bonds, if you bundle a lot of dud businesses into a single business that is doing ok then as an aggregate it looks fine. So bundling Twitter and xAi into SpaceX covers up that. This is why I suspect they will eventually merge Tesla into SpaceX as it is on the decline now.

The problem is that with the current cash on hand and large loans coming due, they only have a 6 month runway. Thus the IPO to get other peoples money to hopefully fund themselves until solvent.

All IPO's are essentially that, people invest in your business, the business uses their money to achieve more, and if it all works out then future profits can eventually be paid back to investors.

> people invest in your business, the business uses their money to achieve more

that was what normally would happen. However, in the last few decades of IPO, it's become common to have two classes of shares - one being the controlling shares that founders hold on to (with 10x the voting rights), and a 2nd class of ordinary (common!) shares with 1x vote per share.

This means the founders (and early investors perhaps) don't give up any controlling stake of a company at all when the IPO while only selling common shares. Doing this means they get to control the company's operations and financial moves, without shareholder oversight, but obtain all of the shareholder investment cash.

You could argue this can lead to better management, as the founders are more likely to care about the company than professional managers that typically would be hired to manage a public company. I say that is only an argument of luck of the draw, rather than a good argument against the above share and voting right splitting.

Look at facebook/meta - would that company be as invested in things like the metaverse, etc, if zuckerberg weren't in a controlling position?

These two classes of shares were only introduced in the 1990s.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com