Yeah, but at what point does the bar for control become meaningless? It's not really productive to raise it to the point that every company ostensibly has no one in control because they have obligations to other parties.

It is productive to discuss how founders like Zuckerberg and Kalanick retained majority voting rights, because that's meaningful even if you use a pithy definition of control that makes it virtually impossible to achieve. Similarly we can talk about the class of shares Snap issued which do not allow shareholders to control the company.

When you abstract legitimate insights like "executives at pre-profitable/public companies can't rely on voting rights for security" to "no one has control as long as customers are a thing", you preempt a lot of very useful discussion. You've defined away the controversy.

I haven’t defined away the controversy, just taken a step back and tried to look at the issue more globally.

My company over the years has transitioned from no employees, to employees, to no employees again, and back to employees. The only time I have been in control (despite having 100% ownership) is when I have had no employees.

When you are thinking about starting a business the decision to employ or not is even bigger than deciding to take in investors.

Or customers

Customers you can turn down - employees you can only fire.