Comment by scottlegrand2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by scottlegrand2 | Hacker News Reader

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Great, then clearly your own personal benefit from owning Facebook stock outweighs any of your dignified moral outrage at Zuckerberg's conduct? I suspect that's why big tobacco is still around as well.

I have been at multiple big tech companies when the stock dropped 20% or more. These events trigger a flurry of media coverage by analysts declaring that said big tech company's reign is over and soon everything will turn to crap (which it doesn't).

But this causes immediate concern among the employees because this directly affects their annual RSU compensation and it causes concern in the leadership because it makes them look bad and they tend to be the sorts that need to look good.

IMO don't underestimate what coordinated dumping of Facebook stock could achieve here. It does seem like a bit of a prisoner's dilemma though. After the initial price drop, the stock will recover because Facebook isn't going away anytime soon. So from a pure greed standpoint, don't sell. But that's not what this is about, is it?

> from a pure greed standpoint, don't sell. But that's not what this is about, is it?

The question I was responding to was “if [investors] dumped all their Facebook stock I wonder how that would affect Zuck?” Whether there are other reasons to sell (I even said “If you don’t want to own Facebook stock, by all means get rid of it”) is beside the point: how does selling affect Zuckerberg? Without going into pop psychology, it doesn’t really affect him at all.

If one manages to drop the value of Facebook stock I believe very strongly it will affect him personally until the stock goes back up.

I have yet to meet the CEO of a big tech company who hasn't invested quite a bit of ego in the success of their company. beyond that, the annoying and persistent questions from market analysts and from his own employees will keep him quite busy. To give Mark Zuckerberg a point, I believe he still shows up for that Friday meeting with his employees.

But I will grant that it would be hard to start a sell-off like this for the same reasons that there are a lot of people who love to yell at their TV whilst listening to their favorite political commentator deliver their daily two minute hate yet a lot of them don't bother to vote.

https://www.nytimes.com/2018/11/17/technology/facebook-mark-...

When you’ve worked for tech companies that had their stock drop 20+%, I’m sure it’s been in response to some relevant information that would affect profitability, such as the company’s earnings coming in low, a bad product launch, a competitor’s good news, a recession, etc. The companies have also had a fighting chance to change their future prospects. The scrambling may not have been enjoyable, but it was rational.

In Facebook’s case we aren’t talking about any new information that would affect the stock price. The dual-class nature of the stock is well-known. Individual investors may not have known, and they may have bought the stock based on wrong information. But for the most part “Zuckerberg still has supermajority voting control” isn’t an actual headline. The only new information is that we now have one datapoint about what Zuckerberg will do when he disagrees with investors. I don’t think that changes the value of the stock in any meaningful way.

The end result is that there’s no reason to believe that upset investors selling off their shares would have any long-term effect on the stock’s price: the moment the price drops, other investors will bid it back up. If Zuckerberg loses any sleep, it will be for less than a week and he wouldn’t need to make any changes (he wouldn’t have time to!).

I suspect you and I need to agree to disagree here. You seem to believe the stock market is strongly efficient. Whereas I think it is weakly efficient. We're not going to change each other's minds but I stick to my belief that you could ruin Mark Zuckerberg's day for quite a while selling off the stock. Failing that, donate money to a political candidate like Elizabeth Warren that will ruin his day for you.

You are correct that I believe the US stock market is generally strongly efficient.

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