If you have 100% of the outstanding shares, you have 100% of the voting rights; treasury stock doesn't vote.

I think the above commenter was trying to say: you can't always own 100% of the outstanding shares with voting rights, because in most cases insiders hold many shares that they will not sell.

No, someone could own the entire float of Facebook shares, and Zuckerberg still has a majority of the voting rights.

That's about two classes of outstanding stock with different rights held by different group of stockholders, not about stock held by the issuing company.

That's not the hypothetical that was posed.

So then you agree that there could be situations where only a couple percent of the ownership of a company is available on the market, and if you buy all of those shares, then you would not control the company?

As in, you agree than a couple insiders could control a large majority of a company, and that this percentages of the company would not be on the open market, and therefore even if you buy all of the shares that are available on the open market (and the definition that I am using would disclude these shares owned by these insiders), you would not control the company?

> So then you agree that there could be situations where only a couple percent of the ownership of a company is available on the market, and if you buy all of those shares, then you would not control the company?

Sure, it's possible that at any given time people aren't offering to sell a majority of the voting power of stock, or (theoretically, at least) any voting stock at all (it's even possible that the only class of stock trading on the market is nonvoting; SNAP I think does that.)

I was taking issue with the particular claim, made twice in the direct chain of ancestry of this comment, that a company could simply hold the majority of it's voting stock itself, so that holding 100% of the shares not owned by the company would not give you control since the company itself (presumably, it's management) would exercise most of the voting rights. It doesn't work that way.

Fair enough, but your comment wasn't phrased specific to that example, it was a general statement about owning 100% of outstanding shares: If you have 100% of the outstanding shares, you have 100% of the voting right

Let's chalk it up to a miscommunication.

“Outstanding shares” has a specific meaning: all authorized and issued non-treasury shares.

If you have 100% of them, you have all voting rights.

I mean, this has to be true right? Otherwise the stock market doesn't function as shared ownership, it would be more like Kickstarter at scale with no recourse for failure to deliver.

Plenty of takeovers have been conducted on the open market, even without consent of the board, also known as a hostile takeover.

Class B shares with no voting rights have been a thing for a long time. When the US government bailed out the banks in 2008, they made sure to buy only Class B shares, so no one could claim the government nationalized the banks and put them under their control, rather they just injected capital.

https://www.investopedia.com/terms/c/classbshares.asp

You are both right, but you are missing the point. It is entirely possible for controlling interests to be held in other classes of shares (or even common), that is not counted in the FREE float available to trade.