alt Hacker NewsIf this had happened at a more recent founder-led tech company, the board would have far less practical independence
Dual-class share structures have become the defacto standard for founder led companies, giving founders disproportionate (even majority) voting power.
Someone like Zuckerberg effectively controls the board and would be extraordinarily difficult to oust against his wishes (absent some exceptional legal intervention or a decision to step aside)
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Crazy we even allow non-voting shares and multiple tiers of shares.
And that’s precisely the sort of arrangement we should ban.
Humans need someone to be accountable to, even if it’s just some guy walking behind you saying “memento mori” twice a day.
Even among dual-class IPOs (which are the minority), only 18% of them have CEO control. [1]
That figure raises to about half if you include all officers/directors.
[1] https://www.law.nyu.edu/sites/default/files/Lowry%20-%20Buck...
Anthropic are planning a bizarre share structure that strips any voting power from shareholders. They will have a single special founders share, held by some new entity owned by the founders, that has 51% voting weight. 1 share to rule them all.
I think even if NVIDIA were founded recently, it still wouldn't have such a share structure. The companies that do have dual class shares are software companies that can grow significantly without raising a ton of capital. NVIDIA being a hardware company, that is a lot harder to do even today.