Re:Silicon Valley’s ‘unicorns’ have regulators worried
by littletimmy on Saturday April 02, 2016 @07:20PM
(#11414064)
Surely you're joking? The "shareholders" OWN the companies in question. Of course it is their right to demand whatever they want from the company - they own the thing. No company can tell its shareholders to fuck off, because it is subservient to them.
Re:Silicon Valley’s ‘unicorns’ have regulators worried
by Throwaway23412 on Saturday April 02, 2016 @07:35PM
(#11414121)
This depends on the structure of control in the companies. Anyone familiar with Facebook and Google knows that Zuckerberg pulled some fantastic manipulation of board seats and Brin and Page created a new class of voting shares that are 10x more powerful than regular shares. In such set-ups, the co-founders have permanent control of their companies without having to hold too many shares.
I imagine that many of the co-founders of the "unicorns" were smart enough to replicate Zuckerberg and Brin/Page and are subservient to no one.
And that scares the regulators because they're paid to keep "everybody in the fold" by extolling the virtues of being publicly owned.
Here's a useful tidbit: the mysterious market forces -- the "shareholders" as they're known -- are actually a small group of individuals or groups that pull the levers of the economy. The regulators rely on these lever-pullers to play ball when need be.
Frankly I think these unicorns are right to fear buying into the US economy by going public, the overt assertions of power by the US government are definitely something to avoid.