1% of their market cap. I don't think we'll see someone with a net worth of $100,000 paying only a $1000 fine for harming children.
i.e., if you earn $100k/year, you'd be "worth" $620k, and 1% of that would be a fine of $6200.
Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
The point is "Market cap is BS".
> Anyway, 6K for harming children at that scale remains ridiculous.
One person managing to harm children at this scale would likely get a penalty much smaller than $16 bn.
Of course even "20-life" is a penalty much smaller than $16 bn, given the average American's lifetime earnings are around the $3m level, i.e. it would take 5000 mean lifetimes to repay the actual fine in the headline.
It's nonsensical to scale down a %-of-wealth fee to one person without also considering that the offence would likely be smaller, and also as an independent consideration how difficult it would be for one person to commit the acts.
The share price is essentially always fake, because the ticker price of any given symbol is in a superposition of all possible values until it gets traded. The bigger the trade you try to make, the bigger the shift you directly cause to the value while you're attempting to make the trade.
Don't get me wrong, I'm happy for e.g. Zuckerberg personally to be ordered to hand over all his shares as any given penalty, but as stated what you describe sounds like a way to avoid paying a penalty.
Diluting existing shareholders by 10% would send a much stronger message than whatever's happening now.
The shareholders already can't remove Zuckerberg, he has 57% of voting control.
And by diluting all shareholders it depresses the price in the future.
The wealth you're talking about is almost entirely bound in owning and controlling facebook, bounces up and down a lot regardless of penalties, and it isn't a liquid asset becase he can't sell without giving up that control…
Except worse than that, because he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control. See e.g. Musk and his BS trillion dollar performance carrot at Tesla where the board is suspiciously arranged in his benefit, or Musk and his BS voting control structure with SpaceX. IIRC Meta's dividends are pathetic and Musk's nonexistent, so you're proposing an even smaller slap on the wrist than the penalty you deride.
And that doesn't matter. If Meta is forced to issue 10% more shares to the plaintiff the value of all shareholders' shares fall 10%. And if the plaintiff dumps all the shares on a single day, they fall even harder.
Zuckerberg's 57% control of a $1.6t company means a lot more than my 50% control of Triceratops Inc. Not because 57% > 50% but because $1.6t > undefined.
> he could probably order the business to print more shares and give them to him do at any time because of his voting control
Unlikely. Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits. And again the stock price falls, so does Zuckerberg's net worth and also the RSU grants of all his employees. To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
You either don't understand finance or are being deliberately obtuse.
And why should Zuckerberg care? You can observe by looking at what he's doing that the only thing he wants to own with 99% of his wealth is Meta itself. If Meta stocks were to literally and permanently devalue by 99%, he's still a multi-billionaire and keeps his various mansions and so on, modulo whatever loans he has.
> Meta is still headquartered in Delaware and such an action would be subject to shareholder lawsuits.
So was Tesla until it wasn't: https://eu.delawareonline.com/story/money/business/2024/06/1...
> To retain them Meta has to spend more money - cash or further share dilution.
The recent fire-rehire scheme, the one where the firing was blamed on AI even though he got many of them back again, appears to be in aid of breaking the requirement to give out all those stock options.
First, that would be communism, and second, what would the government be able to use that for?
That would be news to all of these: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sovereign_wealth_fund
> what would the government be able to use that for?
Even if the government didn't have such a fund, it could sell all the shares at once. Or slowly over time.