I'm not sure, but I think a forced sale requirement would be problematic in the US since it would impose a unilateral obligation on the survivor/divorcee that had not been bargained for by them.
I question the probity of such arrangements as well as special voting or non-voting stock. This is exactly the sort of thing that leads people to conclude that capitalism is rigged.
Why does that make the system "rigged"? If you start a tech firm with four developers and one of the lawyers get a divorce, do you want his ex to have any voting rights when it comes to strategy?
It seems like your comment has several unspoken assumptions that I'm unclear on, but yeah, I do. Insofar as financial instruments are fungible/transferable, they ought to be transparently so. Once you start creating different classes of financial interest, some with decision-making power and some without, you're creating a tiered system and those with the decision power are both incentivized and empowered to put their own interests over others'.
The basic notion of capitalism is that property rights + free markets = optimal economic growth. As soon as you start creating different classes of ownership you're signalling that that's a actually a fiction.
Insofar as financial instruments are fungible/transferable, they ought to be transparently so. On
It's not about the financial instruments. I'm making the assumption that a "side project" that the spouse did with a few of his friends wasn't capital intensive, and it was knowledge based. As a software developer, if I were to start a business, it wouldn't be capital intensive at all. I would need partners that brought a set of skills to the table - maybe a few developers and a person with a marketing background or industry connections. The only costs besides time would be a bunch of AWS resources. The "investments" in my company wouldn't be financial, they would be expertise. Why would one assume that the person's spouse would have the expertise to make intelligent strategic decisions on the direction of the company? What if it were a law firm?
Do you think that Carl Icahn or Baine Capital have the same set of incentives as the employees or the founders of a company? They want to make their money and get out, their time horizon is a lot shorter.
The same could be said of the spouse of a founder. As founders, we would be more likely to care about the long term vision of the company. The spouse may just want to make any money she can right now.
If Mark Zuckerburg hadn't kept a controlling interest in Facebook, would it be where it is today? What if he had sold a controlling interest to Yahoo under pressure from the VCs?
I question the probity of such arrangements as well as special voting or non-voting stock. This is exactly the sort of thing that leads people to conclude that capitalism is rigged.