Not every person is a great diplomat.
Alternatively there could be a provision of swapping "Shares B" for "Shares A" or similar with different voting or veto rights. I think this is also possible in the US, since something similar was done for Facebook? Mark has special voting rights but his inheritors will not?
I question the probity of such arrangements as well as special voting or non-voting stock. This is exactly the sort of thing that leads people to conclude that capitalism is rigged.
The basic notion of capitalism is that property rights + free markets = optimal economic growth. As soon as you start creating different classes of ownership you're signalling that that's a actually a fiction.
It's not about the financial instruments. I'm making the assumption that a "side project" that the spouse did with a few of his friends wasn't capital intensive, and it was knowledge based. As a software developer, if I were to start a business, it wouldn't be capital intensive at all. I would need partners that brought a set of skills to the table - maybe a few developers and a person with a marketing background or industry connections. The only costs besides time would be a bunch of AWS resources. The "investments" in my company wouldn't be financial, they would be expertise. Why would one assume that the person's spouse would have the expertise to make intelligent strategic decisions on the direction of the company? What if it were a law firm?
Do you think that Carl Icahn or Baine Capital have the same set of incentives as the employees or the founders of a company? They want to make their money and get out, their time horizon is a lot shorter.
The same could be said of the spouse of a founder. As founders, we would be more likely to care about the long term vision of the company. The spouse may just want to make any money she can right now.
If Mark Zuckerburg hadn't kept a controlling interest in Facebook, would it be where it is today? What if he had sold a controlling interest to Yahoo under pressure from the VCs?
If I started a business with a friend because I trusted his business instincts and he passed or they divorced, I would be fine with her benefiting financially as much as she would if they were still married but I wouldn't want her being able to make any strategic decisions.
But in the case of the Reddit thread, it seems like her spouses business is more like a partnership. Even with a legal partnership, she is a joint owner in the partnership by default unless some other arrangement is made.
Just to emphasize, if the purpose of the postnup is to keep her from benefiting financially from "his" success while they are married, I find that completely distasteful. But if the purpose is to protect the integrity of the partnership, I don't see a problem with that.
I don't think my wife would want to have any part of the day to day decision making of a computer related company I started and let's assume I wouldn't ask her for a postnup and ask her to sign something on the event of my death that would allow her to be bought out at a fair value or allow her to keep her equity but it be non voting.
What about your failures ? What if you end up commiting a crime, will your wife have share in that ?
If I make dumb decisions, my whole family is affected.
But if it is a business and she would get half of his interest in the business, couldn't that cause hardships on the other partners and allow her to make decisions that are detrimental to the business?
Could he have her sign a fair postnup saying she would get half of any financial interests in the business but no voting rights or that the partners would have automatic rights to buy her out?
I could see all sorts of ways that this could be fair to her but still protect his partners.