back to article How Zuck wields power over Facebook for a few hundred bucks

Mark Zuckerberg's effortless swagger into the business world got an airing in public yesterday when Facebook filed more documents to the US Securities and Exchange Commission ahead of the company going public in a few months' time. Just days before the dominant social network submitted its regulatory filing confirming its plan …

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  1. Eddie Edwards
    Thumb Up

    VCs get screwed by founder, instead of the other way around?

    VCs get screwed by founder, instead of the other way around? Now that's news! Zuckerberg just went up in my estimation.

  2. Ben Holmes
    Thumb Up

    I'm not a fan of Facebook by any stretch of the imagination, but you have to give it to Zuckerberg. Well played sir, well played.

  3. Natalie Gritpants
    WTF?

    Why do people buy second class shares?

    Serious question and I probably own a few via pension funds. It just seems like buying non-voting shares is like buying hope.

    1. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      Because having .0001% of voting shares is useless. It's better to have a non-voting share you can then make cash from, when it goes up say, or when they pay dividends.

      1. Graham Bartlett

        Maybe one is useless - but get a lot of them together...

        This is a classic fail, and it's why the idea of "boards are controlled by their shareholders" has become obsolete.

        The major shareholders in the big listed companies are usually pension and insurance funds or similar big investors. Individually they can't control the whole company - but if a bunch of pension fund managers got together and said "fuck this, they're killing the company and we're going to lose our investments", they could boot out the current board and replace them with people who'd actually run the place properly.

        Trouble is that each fund manager is only looking at their own little pot of shares. So instead of all ganging together and actually doing something about a failing company, instead they're just shuffling shares between each other and playing "pass the hand grenade", with the loser taking the pain when it all eventually blows up.

    2. Local Group
      Happy

      @NG

      I don't think the Class A shares are non voting. They have one vote per share. Zuckerberg's shares, Class B, have 10 votes per share. They Trade For The Same Price. When Zuckerberg sells his B shares he can sell them as Class A or B. You figure that one out.

      The 120,000,000 shares of the IPO will be Zuckerberg's even though he does not own them now. Around the day of the IPO he will exercise options for that number of shares. If the shares trade @$40. that day, he will pay .06 cents per share and sell them for $40. He will sell them as Class A shares. If there are shares that don't get sold, they will be his and they will be Class B.

      All of Wall Street his behind him because they view FB frenzy as a way to make money. Plus there hasn't been anything exciting going on there since OWS.

  4. Jemma

    Im sure the families...

    Of the couple murdered for the heinous crime of unfriending a sociopaths daughter on facebook will be thrilled for the little parasite. It must surely make up for finding out your daughters face just had an argument with the business end of a 30-ought-6.

    Not to mention that teenager who was raped & murdered - or the Harrods shop assistant who found out first hand that 9mm copper jacketed ball rounds and her face didnt really mix.

    Facebook - your friendly neighbourhood crime against humanity...

    For everything else there's real life... Remember that?

    1. David Dawson

      Won't somebody think of the children?

      1. Sean Timarco Baggaley

        No. That's their parents' job.

      2. Anonymous Coward
        Anonymous Coward

        Actually yes. You heard it here first - give me a few days. First have to find a suitable nom de plume..

    2. PaulR79
      WTF?

      Relevance?

      I hate the site and the owner as much, if not more than everyone else but you know things like this were happening long before the internet and Facebore were around, right? It isn't like murder is a new thing that only came about with the launch and popularity of the site. Don't let that stop you from your "think of the children!!!!!!!!!!!!!" mentality and running around trying to get everything under the sun banned because bad things happened.

      Here's a news flash for you, shit happens. It happens whether people are on the internet or not and just because something happened on the internet doesn't make it the only reason. To be blunt, if a moron is so unstable that an online removal of friendship sends them into a murderous rampage it's safe to say that they were a timebomb waiting to go off.

    3. Graham Bartlett

      @Jemma

      Did you have a point, or did you just put your brain on freewheel?

    4. Nuno trancoso

      You should get one too as you seem to live in a walled garden...

      Violent crimes per year on global scale? In the tens/hundreds of thousands? Related to Failbook? Couple of dozens tops?

      It's the same thing as plane crashes you know? When they fall, few hundreds die. But they don't fall all the time. Road related casualties are what? Thousands per day? Heck, road related deaths per year make most modern wars death toll look like small change.

      Difference is, some stuff has "shock and awe" value, some is run on the mill... Most just ISN'T evening news / newspaper material...

      But never let any real wold stuff get in the way of your favorite tabloid and/or crackhead guru of the week views of the world.

      1. Jemma
        FAIL

        True...

        But think on this...

        Every single of those 'couple of dozen, tops' are people who have/had a family. Not quite so funny now is it.

        More to the point, alot of those crimes associated with FB happened *specifically* because of facebook - because of the information placed on that site which the persons concerned both victims and attackers/killers would not otherwise have had or known.

        Do that as a private citizen, and the local Police will be readying their desk drawers with the intent of charging you with aiding and abetting at best - and as a co-defendant in a murder case at worst.

        Do the precise same thing as the reichskanzler of Facebook and people are congratulating you on your stock options and how well you have shafted your colleagues.

        Is my point coming clearer now?

    5. friedegg03
      WTF?

      What has that got to do with anything?

    6. Thomas Whipp

      @Jemma - I've not heard of those specific crimes before, but it does seem rather unfair to blame facebook for them.

      As long as the Internet has been around there have been people who unfortunatly have come into contact with not so nice people that in real life they never would have met - BBS, IRC, email, etc... Its these people who commit crimes.

      Before the Internet people still got harrased by strangers, its ugly but it happens.

      I'm not for a minute saying that its ok for people to behave this way - but seriously lets focus on individual responsability rather than trying to blame a fairly generic platform for the actions of its more extreme users.

      1. Jemma

        The problem with FB is that it can get away with things that would have a private citizen helping the police with their enquiries.

        In the case of that American couple, they had never even met this womans father, right up to the point he killed them. Facebook in that case holds major responsibility, because without that site the whole situation would not have happened, it wouldnt have been possible.

        I am not saying that every single crime on the planet can be blamed on the Joys of Facebook - but it has facilitated several, and thats only the ones we have heard about, to the point people have died as a result.

        1. PotNoodle

          @Jemma - don't be ridiculous. Your argument is that providers of a tool are responsible for the consequences of third-party reactions to its use. Facebook does not facilitate crimes, it facilitates *social interaction*, which sometimes leads to crimes. If you condemn Facebook for being an arena in which things-which-provoke-violence can be said or done, you must condemn the entirety of human civilisation, past, present and future.

    7. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      You are so right about this.

      Let's also not forget those self-serving bastards who gave us roads, telephones, and paper, because all of those things have also been used by murderers and terrorists!

    8. Anonymous Coward
      Anonymous Coward

      @Jemma, despite all the negs, you actually do have a point. You see, one of the responsibilities that Facebook is fighting ardently to avoid is to prevent children from exposure to the whole world.

      The modern tech geek appears to be fantastically insensitive to the effect that some random screwups can have on a child by nuking its self esteem from the comfort of their keyboard. And when such a kid commits suicide, in come the RIP Trolls whose basic answer to the question if they don't have a conscience is "fuck em"). The recent BBC Panorama program "Hunting the Internet bullies" ought to be compulsory viewing for any parent.

      Now for the positive news: those that nagged your comment cannot possibly have a relationship, let alone kids, and so Darwin will take care of that problem..

  5. aBloke FromEarth
    Pirate

    WOOHOO!

    I get more annual leave than the CEO of Facebook!

    Suck on that one, Zuck.

    1. sabroni Silver badge

      As his salary is $1 I expect you're doing better than him there too.

      If only there was some way to make these greedy tax dodging CEOs live on their so called "salaries" without recourse to bonuses or expenses. Now that would be funny....

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