Non-voting common stock is a scam pulled by these fucking billionaire founders to reduce public participation, and concentrate their power, even as they use other’s money for their pet projects.
If a company just needs to take up money for an investment, it can issue bonds. Then it gives up no control, but enters into a fair agreement with someone loaning them capital at fixed rates, with no pretense of ownership.
If they sell shares, that is supposed to represent partial ownership and allow all the owners to collectively decide on strategy. It also brings with it the right to recall board members who go insane, like Musk or Zuckerberg. To prevent that these scumbags issue non-voting stock, or stock that has such reduced voting rights as to be essentially useless. Like SpaceX recently, all the IPO shares (class A) carry a tenth of the voting rights compared to the ones they kept (class B).
ApathyTree@lemmy.dbzer0.com 3 days ago
Companies aren’t required to go public in the first place so it’s a rather moot point. They actively choose to be in the situation where they are beholden to shareholders.
If you owned a company you could just, like, not go asking rich people for money to grow or whatever (what IPO is, basically) and grow naturally on your own merits. Then you don’t even have to worry about what kind of votes people might have.