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▲ Henchman21 12 hours ago

Sorry but IMO this sort of company structure should not be allowed. Private companies should not be able to issue stocks the way Zuck & Elon have. Pull Meta’s charter and redistribute their assets. Let that serve as a notice to Elon that he’s next.

▲nullbio 11 hours ago | parent | next [-]

[flagged]

▲RIMR 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Care to explain why?

▲akiarie 10 hours ago | parent [-]

Because it will demoralise people from founding companies. Control is one of the highest priorities that founders have. Throttle that (or throttle personal wealth incentives) and you won't have more companies under control, you'll have less innovators.

Why? Because most innovators have an experience of trying in vain to make contributions within a company/authority structure that directly undermined their capacity to make these contributions.

▲badrequest 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

ah, well, I'll just have to take your word for it, since you've articulated no form of case whatsoever

▲monideas 12 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Under that standard why not just strip you of all your wealth and property and redistribute it? You’re not deserving of anything at all.

▲Thrymr 11 hours ago | parent [-]

The argument is that the shareholders who own the majority of a company's stock (by value, not voting rights) should be able to control the company, not a minority owner. It is the corporate structure that allows guaranteed minority control (e.g. Zuckerberg owns something like 13% of Meta, but controls 60% of the voting power). In a free market, why should publicly traded companies be allowed to sell "shares" that are not ownership in the traditional sense?

▲monideas 10 hours ago | parent | next [-]

In an actual free market the distinction between “public” and “private” company would be really just some transparency/accounting standard or set of standards set by the particular exchange(s) that the shares were traded on.

And just to be clear in practice, stocks are not priced based on their voting rights but rather expectations of their future cash flows (dividends) or simply how much the stock is expected to go up or down by. A lot of modern financial activity is nonsense.

If you really want to actually understand what a company is you should go look up when corporations became a thing and why. It had to do with various legal protections to stimulate economic activity and tax revenues.

All of these modern notions and principles that you’re invoking or basing your arguments on about ownership are most likely just contrived nonsense. These aren’t necessarily eternal principles of anything.

▲deaton 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Same reason people should be permitted to buy those same non-voting shares. Because nobody is forcing anyone to.

▲logicchains 11 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]

Ask almost anyone here and they'll tell you that the C-suite are mostly a bunch of morons who don't know anything about technology, and now you want to ensure that businesses can only ever be run by such technologically illiterate morons, not founders? Insanity!

▲m4rtink 11 hours ago | parent [-]

So if you don't want to to happen just don't issue shares on the stock market ?

▲drstewart 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Sorry but making laws retroactive is authoritarian. We should make it illegal to propose such things and put you in prison.

▲Henchman21 7 hours ago | parent [-]

It's entirely fair to think that, given what I said, that I would mean to do this without some form of legal basis. Not so!

Is it my view that Meta has engaged in a sustained course of unlawful conduct that persists despite the judgements the law has already applied, and will persist into the future. As a corporation who is consistently in court, and based in Delaware, it surely seems to me the bar has been passed -- the AG of the state would be well within their rights to revoke their charter. Meta's entire basis of being at this point is to control public discourse. That's direct harm to the state and the public at large.

What happens to their assets afterwards is a job for the courts. Applying existing law is "retroactive authoritarian". Pfft, please. Ignorance of the law is not a defense against it.