I'd settle for corporate jail time. No more profiting off illegal activity when the fine is less than profit. Nope, corporate jail. All operations have to stop for your sentence. No sales, no product development, no operations. Maybe an outside team of accountants can be allowed to run your books. This would effectively be a death sentence for many companies, but at least it mirrors the experience humans have to endure - loss of job, family loss of income, loss of ability to get future employment, etc.

> Corporate Death Penalty is exactly what the country needs to recover from this nightmare

No. That's a bail-out for Meta. Just assess massive fines. That sidesteps the legal novelty of a "corporate death penalty," together with the fact that just revoking a charter doesn't actually do anything for assets. (Corporate death penalties done right are fines with extra steps. There are many more ways to do it wrong, e.g. thinking revoking a corporate charter means anything.)

The only people who should be arguing for a corporate death penalty right now are Meta's lawyers to distract from the possibility of the real penalty: massive fines.

The US used to pull business charters all the time. It was a common place thing before the world wars.

Chain of responsibility legislation that puts individuals in prison for their part would be an excellent start.

I originally had a thing about "piercing the corporate veil" written, but after some consultation with Google's shit AI[0], it told me about the legal writ of "quo warranto"[1], which was apparently used as legal proceedings in the US to argue for the dissolution of a company.

So, in other words, we have a corporate death penalty, it just has a weird name, is mired in a bunch of weirdly English legal history, and it isn't very well used[2]. Also, the motion for the writ would have to be filed by Delaware's AG specifically.

Also, also, this is a nuclear option.

The primary hurdle of filing a quo warranto lawsuit against Facebook would be political, not procedural: Texas would really, really like to replace Delaware as the default state large enterprises incorporate in[3]. In fact, this process is already happening. Delaware made the mistake of enforcing their shareholder protection laws against Elon Musk's pay packet, so Texas is promising corporations a jurisdiction where shareholders donate their capital to the company for absolutely nothing in return except a token that they can pump the value of. In other words, Texas is a rotten borough that is stripping away all the ability for minority stakeholders to sue.

So if Delaware actually moves to revoke Facebook[4]'s charter, that might scare every other corporation out of Delaware - including the ones that aren't obvious scams. There's probably some way Delaware could hold existing corporations hostage there, but that would be an even more thermonuclear option.

That being said, I'm starting to wonder if the concept of a "nuclear option" is even meaningful in a world where "correctly deciding a shareholder rights case" destroys your reputation as a fair and neutral arbiter of those rights. Why bother keeping your powder dry if it's evaporating anyway? Go out with a bang and kill Facebook.

[0] Which if Google hadn't enshittified their traditional search index, I wouldn't have to use this.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quo_warranto#United_States

[2] One may argue that the state doesn't use this very often because rapacious corporations happen to be useful to rapacious nation-states.

[3] Confusingly, they're calling this "DExit", which is annoying because we already use "Dexit" to refer to Pokemon Sword and Shield not shipping with all the Pokemon in it.

[4] It is always ethical to deadname corporations.

While that is certainly a topic worth pursuing, especially for anyone with a "corporations are people" argument, the challenge is the immediate vacuum afterwards, which is likely to attract copy-cats.

You might "execute" a corporation for proven anti-human actions, but that takes time. New corporations can crop up, maybe even involving some of the same prior executives, and the cycle starts again.

That has far reaching unintended consequences. Thousands of people out of jobs, investors out of money, etc. We’re not just talking fat cat shareholders. There are institutional investors, pension plans, 401k’s. Killing a company like Meta has a financial impact on virtually everyone in the country when the people we’re actually trying to punish are the slimeball CEO and his inner circle of executives.

Our system can’t bear something like a corporate death penalty. Maybe that’s another problem in and of itself. You won’t ever catch me advocating for a company like Meta - they are among the worst - but the solution can’t be one with the potential to kick off a 2008-style financial crisis. The cure can't be as painful as the disease.