Yes, agreed. Further, this has always been the case, and it's been discussed since the Facebook IPO.
The rules of the game are clear. Someone who doesn't like this game is free to walk away and do something else (most public companies don't have a CEO with majority voting power). Complaining without acknowledging the rules seems like misdirected energy.
He elects a majority of the board members through his shares. In fact, the board can indeed fire him even if he (as a member of the board) votes against the rest of the board. I wouldn't characterize the current board as being Mark loyalists https://investor.fb.com/leadership-and-governance/?section=b....
Even as a controlling shareholder, the ex-CEO could take months to go through the process of nominating new board members and holding a shareholder election according to the corporate bylaws before his new hand-picked board members could hire him back.
This. Owning ~20% of normal stocks and ~60% of voting stocks shouldn't be allowed for public company. At some point company becomes just CEO's toy to do things they want, in this case "metaverse".
Why not? Nobody put a gun to anybody's head and made them invest in META.
Arguably there's forced investment by index fund holders but now the SP500 eschews companies with that structure, so even index investors can avoid this sort of thing.
I'd argue that no single person should have that much power and wealth in this country. Why is it okay that Zuckerberg has absolute power over one of the most influential companies in the world? How does that benefit society as a whole?
> Why is it okay that Zuckerberg has absolute power over one of the most influential companies in the world?
Because that's the company he founded and owns. It wasn't one of the most influential companies in the world upon being founded, it became so with Zuck at the helm.
> How does that benefit society as a whole?
How does this have anything to do with anything? And how do you propose we measure it?
The author should do some reading on Facebook's share ownership structure and come back to tell their readers on who owns the majority of the voting power and then just delete this entire article; since honestly, I stopped reading when I read the title.
Good luck on "Fire Mark Zuckerberg" without his 'say so', unless he does it himself.
>This is not a plucky startup founder or a journeyman finding his feet, but a guy who has the majority of voting power in a publicly-traded trillion-dollar enterprise who is giving a “forgot to prepare for this meeting” style speech.
Nobody can fire him unless he votes with them to do it.