I understand it's a move to keep his voting shares but... Why would the board care if the Zuck was to sell his big house in California? What was the threat to Meta/the board?
So basically meta stepped in to say they'd pay a portion of zucks tax burden to protect the supply/demand ratio of the stock, which protects the overall market price of Facebook stock and the valuation of the company as a whole.
Wealth taxes are inherently stupid in our modern financial system and this is a clear example of why.
It isn't stupid. Multi hundred billionaires shouldn't exist. Then this wouldn't be a "problem".
Honestly if any one has more than $999 the government should take it from them.
Billionaires exert a lot of influence on elections and political parties. When they want a bill killed, they can make that happen with enough money. Is this 100%? No, but looking at races around the country they clearly win enough times.
Billionaires can use their wealth to shield themselves from the law in a way few but the most powerful leaders. I can't do that.
Billionaires decide if our food is safe to eat, unless the pesky FDA gets in the way. Good thing Billionaires can also stop the FDA.
Billionaires destroy public trust in healthcare through "wellness" and "holistic care", because of course there is money to be made there (10x more than "Big Pharma"). Big Pharma is also capable of sabotaging health for their own profits. The Sacklers?
Billionaires direct (the US) government to engage in wars the people don't want.
I could go on for how many industries they control with zero input, or the bare minimum, from the rest of us.
But sure, tell me how a "thousandaire" is directing entire markets and countries to act as they singly wish. I have to coordinate with hundreds of thousands, or even millions, to get policies I like. But a single billionaire? They can stand in the way and make that entire fight so, so much harder. And its painfully obvious the only reason they do so is to further enrich themselves.
One of the bigger failings of the US government over the last half century is allowing corporations to grow and merge their way to become as large as many have. Stronger enforcement of anti-trust would have both significantly reduced wealth inequality in this country as well as siphoned off much of the growing political power corporations have relative to regular citizens.
OK, to be more precise: it would still have a market cap of "multiple hundred billions of dollars" if it never acquired or merged with any other companies.
It's arguable how much of Facebook's current size is a result of natural growth versus what it's gained through said mergers and acquisitions. I'm far more concerned about the fact it's a trillion-dollar company and how large a proportion of people exclusively get their news and other facts from Facebook.
The company is in desperate need of splitting up.
Walk me through that. In 1999, some people proposed splitting up Microsoft. One spinoff would own Internet Explorer, another would own the office suite, a third would own Windows.
You could spin off Instagram and Whatsapp, but after you do that, Facebook is still really big -- worth many 100s of billions. How to split that up?
Every user east of the Mississippi ends up in Facebook East and every user to the west in Facebook West??
Monopolies are not good things. I've been boycotting Amazon for almost 10 years, you can too.
We might explore breaking up the data centers from the software lines of business across Google, Amazon, Microsoft, Meta, and more. We have become enamored with vertical integration and acquisitions to the determent of vibrancy in our economy.
There is some reason to think that personal AI agents like Meta Muse will disrupt Amazon's retail business. Amazon currently blocks those bots and doesn't seem to have a strategy to address them.
Pick one: total and complete control over your company, or give it up to the market. Why should owners get the best of both worlds, and at this point trillions of capital themselves?
https://www.bloomberg.com/opinion/newsletters/2026-10-22/zuc...
> The solution is a quasi-share split: Meta is creating a new Class C stock, with zero votes per share. Shareholders will get one no-vote Class C share for every one-vote Class A share or 10-vote Class B share that they currently own. Zuckerberg, who owns about 341 million high-vote Class B shares (and like 1 million low-vote shares), will get about 342 million new zero-vote shares; all the other shareholders, who own about 3.4 billion low-vote shares, will get 3.4 billion new no-vote shares.
And in the footnotes:
> Stock exchange rules prevent already-public companies from creating new high-vote shares, or from distributing new low/zero-vote shares in non-proportional ways. So Meta could not, for instance, give Zuckerberg a big dividend of voting shares while giving everyone else a big dividend of zero-vote shares. But this mechanism — giving everyone the same dividend of zero-voting shares — works.
"our modern financial system" is what is left of a reasonable but by now largely dismantled financial system that used to exist between roughly the 1930s and 1980s.
The entire phrase "Wealth taxes are inherently stupid in our modern financial system" has "throwing up my hands" and "there's nothing we can possibly do" written all over it. The financial system is a societal construct, not a natural constant like, say, the speed of light.
If not "wealth taxes", then what? Poverty taxes?
We are on HN. Do you have any doubts about the demographic here would prefer?
Gotta brown nose those corporate overlords.
My guess is you can expect a stock price crash if your founder-star CEO moves away from HQ? It would mean tech stocks behave quite differently from e.g. Starbucks. Also seems like a literal chicken race since Mark would be affected even more than the board if that happened on top of everything else.
I guess most likely is they just needed a reason of some sort to report to the SEC so that's what they used. Much nicer sounding than Mark threatening to replace the board, or the board are obviously his puppets, or anything else that happens at a founder-controlled (via low-vote shares) company.
That is all this is, a guy giving himself a pay increase, which almost everyone would if they could.