Jensen messed up by splitting the power between all board members equally, and not getting a bunch of his family on a board.
The lesson is that if you do the right, non-authoritarian thing, you get punished
The comparison was drawn because when you are such a position of power, your actions have such a monumental sway. Thousands, millions of people’s of lives are impacted, for better or for worse. In Jensen’s case, that’s up to the court of public opinion.
However the thinking is that when you are in that position, a just and fair society would probably want to keep just and fair and morally tact people in those positions.
IMHO I don’t care what way you want to spin it, when you have that level of influence over one of the major drivers of the AI boom, you have INCREDIBLE power compared to what most people think of when you say “private citizen”.
My buddies and I were just talking about how Jensen is probably one of the MOST liked amongst all the leading big tech CEO/Owners. I feel like the amount of grace this thread is giving him is proof of that.
I don’t understand how that’s comparable to the perception of Musk.
Are you sure you are not over reacting?
These tech CEOs hold a lot of influence and power. Thus they hold a lot of responsibility and must be held accountable. Point blank.
How did they get that tax money? Why do you think that should give anyone an ownership stake?
Do you think buying a McDonald’s hamburger should grant you partial control of McDonald’s?
The man is smart enough to know he was playing with fire, and he got burned. The literal definition of FAFO.
The thing he did that was actually wrong was that the NVIDIA executive he was in a sexual relationship with was herself married. That is actually wrong, that’s not “playing with fire”, that’s simply wrong.
And just to be clear in practice, stocks are not priced based on their voting rights but rather expectations of their future cash flows (dividends) or simply how much the stock is expected to go up or down by. A lot of modern financial activity is nonsense.
If you really want to actually understand what a company is you should go look up when corporations became a thing and why. It had to do with various legal protections to stimulate economic activity and tax revenues.
All of these modern notions and principles that you’re invoking or basing your arguments on about ownership are most likely just contrived nonsense. These aren’t necessarily eternal principles of anything.
Is it my view that Meta has engaged in a sustained course of unlawful conduct that persists despite the judgements the law has already applied, and will persist into the future. As a corporation who is consistently in court, and based in Delaware, it surely seems to me the bar has been passed -- the AG of the state would be well within their rights to revoke their charter. Meta's entire basis of being at this point is to control public discourse. That's direct harm to the state and the public at large.
What happens to their assets afterwards is a job for the courts. Applying existing law is "retroactive authoritarian". Pfft, please. Ignorance of the law is not a defense against it.
What is the actual value add of a “board of directors” except to basically be weak willed PMC/non founder-type people with a lot to lose reputationally and financially who can be cowed and/or blackmailed very easily.
The typical person on the board of a public company would fold to pressure as soon as they saw a NY Times reporter called their phone.
So this just proves my point.
you have to be jesting to use this term in the board of directors of one of the most expensive corporations out there
Cheating on your wife and betraying your country is the right, non authoritarian thing? We arent having this discussion for any other reason than those two events happening. Its an insane lens of entitlement to view the situation as if he should indefinitely retain ownership due to ... what? Existing? But never have any of his actions have consequences. That's the promise you make by positioning the board shares in that manner: you promise to have accountability. Finding it a weakness to answer to others for your actions is definitely a popular style of thinking amongst the current group of wanna-be authoritarians in the presidential cabinet, "strange" how your first two examples of CEOs unwaveringly align with that political faction huh?
If you are competing in a neoliberal environment where other companies play by these rules, you are at a disadvantage if you are following some superset of them.
I am not saying that he has done 100% right things, I am just saying that if he set himself up in the same way as his competitors, he would have been fine. Maybe he would have to pay some fine/bribe, similar to what the prior 2 have done for their infractions against the people.
You don't have to agree with leftists but ignoring the premise just lets you talk past the point.
Jensen chose to set up his company in such a way that he had to follow a superset of the rules that his competitors did. My point is that was a competitive advantage; even though it unmade him, that superset was a necessary tradeoff to be the head of a $4T company. We can see this because those other companies have started to be held financially accountable; the same lack of accountability that lets those leaders get away with affairs also lets them “get away with” withholding evidence (and the resulting $243M punitive damages). Unaccountable power (which is what parent is arguing for) is brittle and fragile.
Alphabet is $3.6T, Meta is $1.6T, X+SpaceX+Tesla is $3.6T. All of these companies are doing just as well despite their CEO monopolist setup.
The legal infractions, also known as cost of business, is a part of the calculation, and are usually too small to be meaningful. Meta's last New Mexico lawsuit essentially managed to get flipped into a requirement for producing ID upon registration to the platform in order to "protect the kids", as well as the amount to pay currently being pushed down by pouring money on the lawyers. This is something that was really hard to push on the public before due to privacy concerns, and now yields an even better tool for mapping, control and harvesting of behavioural surplus. Again, cost of business to consolidate power.
If Jensen had had this structure, gotten some lawyers together and thought a little, they would most likely, as all the other big tech corps have, have been able to twist and turn this in a similar way.