If only the shareholders had any kind of voice - if only it was illegal to issue a fake IPO where you sell an overwhelming number of shares stripped of their voting power - if only the market responded rationally to this boondoggle.

If we're going to right the ship in turn of common sense a bunch of people need to lose a bunch of money, I just hope it doesn't mostly hit passive investors and instead lands mostly on Elon-stans.

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over_bridge 3 hours ago | parent | next [-]

How is it legal to have different share classes? You could make 100 shares that can vote and then sell 99.9% of the company while maintaining full control. Seems strongly against the spirit of a publicly traded company

	▲	Kirby64 14 minutes ago \| parent \| next [-]
		There's some companies (Snap being one of them) where certain classes of shares have NO voting rights. If you think SpaceX is lopsided, look at Snap's shares. They have A, B, and C class. The founders of Snap own 95% of the voting through their Class C shares... literally only pre-IPO folks have any voting rights.
	▲	andruby 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Most large companies do that these days: GOOG, META all have different share classes. Even the small startup I worked for had that.
	▲	skissane 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev \| next [-]
		Musk didn’t invent the idea of using multiple share classes to ensure the founder(s) retain control of the company, see Rupert Murdoch, Google, Facebook, etc From the regulators’ perspective: it is a risk, but you disclosed that risk in the prospectus that buyers are assumed to have read (what percentage ever actually do?), hence it is fine Well, when you buy into an IPO, they make you sign to say you read it. So either you did, or you made a false statement on a legal document
	▲	LearnYouALisp 3 hours ago \| parent \| prev [-]
		Who has the gold makes the rules

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verzali 4 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

I suppose they kind of do, they could sell the stock and drive the price down. That wouldn't force Musk to change direction, but it would hurt his wealth.

	▲	munk-a 42 minutes ago \| parent [-]
		If he was smart it'd be to a very limited extent. If you have this much wealth in something as unpredictable as the stock market I think the very wise move is to start converting it into stock backed loans[1] that you leverage to buy real assets - buy islands and small countries, buy other successful large companies and just let them keep trending slowly upwards, pick up that New Zealand bunker... just try and get your money diversified and into things that would survive a stock price collapse. Even if Elon did this with 1% or 10% of his wealth and kept the vast majority of his assets invested in this one clump of companies and they went to zero he'd still be sitting on an insane pile of cash. 1. Lets all pour out a drink to the bankers who authorize such insane loan agreements.