My understanding is that the employees are the largest shareholder of Facebook – so naturally they would be the largest beneficiary of any stock buy back.
But this was exactly my point in regards to the importance of the stock price for securing talent. The company is owned in large part by its employees and they will jump ship if they don't believe in the company's future.
> My understanding is that the employees are the largest shareholder of Facebook
The employees are not a shareholder, largest or otherwise. If you counted them as one, though, sure, they’d be the largest, trivially, since as CEO Zuck is an employee, and he, considered alone, is already the largest single (individual or institutional) shareholder by a very large margin, Vanguard and BlackRock are #2 and #3, and together have less than Zuck does.
I don't believe there is more up to date information on the breakdown of the shareholders.
Obviously Zuck is the largest single shareholder – he is the founder – but at time of IPO at least, the employees own more than him in total.
This isn't that uncommon for tech companies either. It's quite typical for companies like Facebook to give away a few percent of the company each year to employees in the form of stock based comp. I thought people on HN generally work for tech companies and were aware of this? A large part of your total compensation if you work at a company like Google or Amazon comes in the form of stock. Employees (especially the early employees) generally own a very significant amount of companies like Facebook and Google.
> Excluding Zuck, at IPO the "employees" in aggregate were the largest group of shareholders.
No, just because an article arbitrarily treats them as a group and every other entity as an individual entity doesn’t make them ”the biggest group”, and the immediate pre-IPO distribution (when comp was more heavily weighted to equity and there was no practical way for most employees to exit their equity position pre-IPO) is likely not refleftive of current distribution more than a decade post-IPO distribution.
And “employees excluding Zuckerberg” aren’t a coherent, interest-aligned group abyhow.
I'm the only one providing explanations here. I'm the only one who bothered to try to provide a source for the claims I was making. I explained that I don't believe there's more recent data, so yes, I am supporting my "thesis" with an article from 2012. Everyone is just making baseless comments here anyway, "ree, Zuck bad", so whatever, believe what you like for all I care.
The point I was originally trying to make was that technology companies (including Facebook) compensate their employees with billions of dollars of stock every year[1] ($12b last year in the case of META). This means the employees of technology companies are generally significant shareholders of the company – whether they're the largest, second largest or third largest owner is frankly irrelevant to my point – employees benefit massively when the share price goes up because in many cases most of the wealth of those employees is tied to the company stock.
None of what I'm saying here should be controversial and is widely understood by tech workers at companies like Facebook, Google and Amazon.
I have no idea what Zuck or BlackRock being a large individual holder of META stock has to do with anything. Do you guys think that the thousands of employees at Facebook should (or could) have 10% of the company each or something? Obviously Zuck owns more than any individual holder – it's his company. And yes, obviously, there are large institutions that hold Facebook on behalf of their clients – most of whom by the way are just average people who have money invested with companies like BlackRock for their retirement. Are you guys also surprised to hear that 89 year old Doris doesn't manage her retirement portfolio on Robinhood or something?
If you're honestly unhappy that companies like Facebook don't give enough of their stock away to employees then I don't know what to say to you. You'll find one of the main complaints institutional share holders will cite when it comes to owning the stock of tech companies is that they give away far too much stock to their employees. This dilutes investors like BlackRock at the benefit of employees receiving SBC.
In my opinion the reality here is completely opposite to what this community is trying to paint. But I know, I know. Zuck is rich and therefore he must be a bad boy who doesn't care about any one or anything other than his own wealth.
But this was exactly my point in regards to the importance of the stock price for securing talent. The company is owned in large part by its employees and they will jump ship if they don't believe in the company's future.