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I still can't believe that investors are willing to trust Larry and Sergey in perpetuity(same goes for Zuckerberg and there are many other corporate doing this gambit).

Sure, I like all the weird sideprojects, but what happens when they decide to build a 100B Monolith on a moon? If you happen to own Class C shares, you have no say.

If you own Class C and to some extent A shareholders get a raw deal.

The Class B holders have their cake and eat it too.

It just feels morally wrong that someone owning 20% or 15% of company controls 50+% of the votes.



Here's my take... It's not a moral decision, it's a financing decision. Larry and Sergey (and their initial backers) made a decision to put this structure in place. Everyone is free to decide to invest or not invest in it. Conventional theory suggests that investors don't like these types of arrangements, and these provisions weigh down the price of the stock. Therefore, the original owners had to accept a smaller valuation based on this.

This isn't a morality thing, it means that the Class A common stock holder are more like bondholders (who put in money without votes) with upside, rather than full owners. But all of them were well informed about this when they put the money in.

This is not to say that we should all invest in Class A shares, just that this structure is one way of many to invest in a company, and people who don't like it can put their money elsewhere.


> It just feels morally wrong that someone owning 20% or 15% of company controls 50+% of the votes.

Shareholders don't really "own" a company in the traditional sense. They own a specific package of claims against the company in the event of dissolution, voting rights, etc. In the simple case of a company with one class of shareholders, the analogy between owning X% of the shares and owning X% of the company is fairly close, when you have differentiated share classes that analogy is less close.

And shareholders own because they choose to acquire the stock under specific terms. If they don't like the terms, they can just not accept the deal that would give them the stock. I don't see how its morally wrong that someone that bought a set of claims that don't include voting rights, or include smaller voting rights than some other set of claims, has exactly what they bought.




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