Who Needs Shareholders?

What good are shareholders? What value do they really provide? Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s CEO, took an end run around them in the company’s troubled IPO. Like other tech giants, Facebook issued insiders a parallel, more-powerful class of stock, which has 10 times the voting weight of the stock offered to the public. Zuckerberg’s shares give him control of nearly 57% of the company’s voting rights, ensuring that outside shareholders will have little say over how Facebook is run.