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Comment by antihero | Hacker News Reader

What's to stop a rich asshole buying up a massive majority and then just making him do fucked up stuff?

He can refuse to do what he's told to - it refers to this in the article.

His share price might then collapse, and he has a substantial financial stake in himself.

It's the same as any company - all the staff could refuse to cooperate and walk out, and it would be worth nothing overnight.

“The shareholders, meanwhile, were well aware of their power. “If he doesn’t do whatever we say, we’ll sell and his share price will fall,” Berezin says. And sure enough, when shareholders voted him vegetarian, Merrill complied, even though he had been an avid meat eater. He was a longtime Democrat, but his investors decided to make him register as a Republican, which they argued was more business-friendly.”

Sounds to me like he doesn't have the power to decide for himself.

He has the power, he's simply not exercising it.

Would you like to share your thought process, proof or sources? Or is simply disagreeing sufficiently satisfying for you? Elsewhere in this thread, you seem to be making the same point that you're now disagreeing with: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5455642

Here's another quote that makes me think he seriously only gave himself nonvoting shares:

“shareholders don't dictate what's tabled. We can only vote on what's proposed, the implication being that K5M is fine with either outcome.”

I haven't read any legal contracts, but I'm under the impression that as a human being, he can decide to opt out of any of their decisions, with the only outcome being his stock price dropping.

He's not a literal slave.

Sure, for the law this is probably just a role playing game. What I was talking about is that within the constraints of the game, he has no vote. Other commenters seem convinced that he has voting shares but promised not to use them. I haven't seen any proof for that yet.

I do think that as this experiment goes on and the Kmikeym stock price goes up, the stakes increase and it becomes harder to back out. Imagine: an organized crime syndicate could buy $1 million in Kmikeym stock to launder money – if he does anything that adversely influences Kmikeym share price, he might be in for a world of hurt. Or another scenario: his parents might be so convinced in their son's success that they mortgage their house to pay for shares in Kmikeym. If he screws up, his parents lose their home.

In the context of the game, you're right, he has no vote. But this isn't Pathfinder, there are very real out-of-game-context consequences to this game. This is more akin to a long-term slave BSDM relationship.

Yes, but these are things that he a)he proposed those votes himself, probably as an exercise in proving there is value in the concept (a share would be worthless if all it allowed was voting unimportant things). b)he complied with only to keep share price up. The article says it: "If he doesn't do whatever we say, we'll sell and his share price will fall". The worse that will happen is that experiment will be a failure, which is inherently the case if he doesn't respect his shareholder's decisions anyway.

He has the overwhelming majority interest. He's promised not to vote with his shared but the option remains open if he's told to do something illegal.

Even minority shareholders and employees have the inalienable power to decline to break the law. That applies to any contract.

I guess there are limits to what the shareholders can make him do. After all slavery has been abolished. Still I think it's a quite risky idea.

yeah, i had that idea a long time ago. in a dream i did just this, and then donald trump bought up a controlling interest in me. i had to call him up to figure out which socks to put on.

this is kind of a neat idea, an investment in future potential writ small.

It's sort of a microcosm of capitalism in that respect, don't you think? It's a wonder that our system works as well as it does.

Because people can choose whether to "sell shares" or not? A controlling stake would be worth rather more than a minority one, surely?

You think capitalism works?

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