Michael Hiltzik: Meta and Twitter show the drawbacks of giving self-satisfied billionaires too much power
Back in the prehistoric era — in 2012, when Facebook staged one of the most hyped initial public stock offerings of all time — I warned the company's newly minted shareholders that they had become wedded to Mark Zuckerberg.
Then 28, the company founder became one of the most deeply entrenched chief executives in American business. Facebook's two-class stock structure allowed Zuckerberg to control 57% of all shareholder votes despite owning only about 28% of all its shares.
"You better hope he does everything right," I wrote, "because if he doesn't, he'll be harder to get rid of than tuberculosis."
According to the company's latest proxy statement, that's still the case. Zuckerberg owns less than 1% of Meta's publicly traded Class A stock, which carries the right to one vote per share, but 84.7% of its Class B shares, which give its owners 10 votes per share.
His total voting power: 54.4%. In other words, he's the emperor of Meta-land.
Investors don't normally clamor for stakes in companies with entrenched management because they like the two-class structure in principle.
They do it because they've bought into the story that the entrenched founder or CEO
