Facebook is a publicly held company. Mark Zuckerberg has less than 30% of its shares.
> We created Zuckerberg ourselves by collectively choosing to use Facebook to regulate our social lives
And people will let it until they lose trust in Facebook or if an alternative comes along that serves their needs better. AOL, Friendster, and MySpace came before, they screwed up, and are insignificant now.
Their entire premise is "We're smarter than the rest of the world and you poor people can't be trusted with the big important decisions of us billionaires." This is social media on the internet after all—the most important advancement in humanity's collective history.
And anyway, I've always thought that the title 'publicly held company' is a bit of a misnomer. The word 'public' (to some people) almost implies a connotation of public interest and true public ownership... when the reality of it is actually the opposite in a lot of cases.