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Comment by WalterBright | Hacker News Reader

> nonsense

May I present Steve Jobs, another obvious example? Ray Croc who built McDonald's from a single location into a world empire.

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Steve Jobs, who became CEO when Apple, as a public company, hired him from outside the company?

Who literally saved Apple from their attempted corporate suicide? Yeah, I think he is a good example of why you need a strong founder sometimes.

I think their point is that you can have a strong leader that doesn't have control of the company through ownership mechanism.

Steve Jobs at Apple is a perfect example, since it was a publicly traded company that Steve Jobs didn't control. However, he was still able to be an extremely effective leader as the CEO.

He had de facto control. Nobody was able to successfully defy him. He used this control to force his vision upon Apple. No committee would have done what he did.

That's... not the point at all? This post is about a law that (to Sweeney's claim) would force founders to sell their controlling stock. This law wouldn't affect "de facto" control of a company -- it would affect actual stock-driven control of a company. The fact that Jobs did not have stock-driven control of Apple, and yet he was still able to "force his vision upon Apple" as you said, would make him a good example of why this law could be effective, since this law would not have affected Jobs' control of Apple.

Right, that's exactly my point!

It's possible to be CEO, and exert control over a company without literally owning >51% of the voting shares.

A good leader can "control" a company without having legal control over it. That's exactly the point about Steve Jobs.

The assertion is that: It is possible to be a dictatorial executive CEO, without having 51% of the voting rights of the company. This is the corollary of "losing control of the voting rights of the company doesn't automatically imply that the company must be run by committee". Steve Jobs proves both of those assertions to be true.

I worked at Apple when Steve Jobs was there. Yes he's amazing.

But people like Avie Tevanian, Tim Cook, Bertrand Serlet, Bob Mansfield, Johnny Ive, Dan Riccio etc. all played critical roles in turning Apple around.

iPhone simply isn't a success without all of the above functioning at a high level.

Of course those people helped.

But there's no doubt who was in charge and who set the direction. From everything I've read about Apple, it was Jobs who was in command, and everyone else followed.

Well I would suggesting looking a bit more into the company.

Because it's never been the case that Steve Jobs was in charge and everyone just fell in line. It's always been consultative and has always been the leadership team making the decisions. It's in fact how most companies run.

Especially given Steve was not 100% during most of his time at Apple.

The point is there has to be someone to make the final decisions, be they talented or not. You could vote on everything, but I don't think that would be efficient or even make sense for all circumstances.

But what does that have to do with that person having a majority interest in the company?

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