Facebook Shareholders Have Drawn Up A New Proposal To Fire Mark Zuckerberg As Chairman
Source: Business Insider
A Facebook investor has drawn up a new proposal to oust Mark Zuckerberg as chairman, 10 months before the social networking giant's next shareholder meeting. The proposal, which reflects the strong feeling among Facebook investors that governance changes are essential, was written by Trillium Asset Management, which manages around $11 million (£8.4 million) in Facebook stock.
It was filed just hours before a brutal Facebook second-quarter earnings update on Wednesday, which sent the firm's share price tumbling nearly 24%, wiping as much as $148 billion off its value. Trillium's proposal, if greenlit by investors including Facebook's own management, would require the company to appoint an independent chairman, breaking up Zuckerberg's dual role as CEO and chairman.
"A CEO who also serves as chair can exert excessive influence on the board and its agenda, weakening the boards oversight of management," the proposal states. Separating the chair and CEO positions reduces this conflict, and an independent chair provides the clearest separation of power between the CEO and the rest of the board."
Facebook's "mishandling" of scandals are cited as the reason why the change is necessary. Crises referenced include meddling in the 2016 presidential election, Cambridge Analytica, and the recent situation in Myanmar, where Facebook was blamed for exacerbating the Rohingya crisis...more...
Read more: https://www.msn.com/en-us/money/companies/facebook-shareholders-have-drawn-up-a-new-proposal-to-fire-mark-zuckerberg-as-chairman/ar-BBL4wRj?li=BBnbfcL
Trillium hopes the proposal will attract the support of other shareholders. A similar proposal to oust Zuckerberg as chairman was put forward last year and rejected, despite 51% of independent investors voting in favour of the change.
Business Insider spoke to six shareholders last month who control $3 billion of Facebook stock. They want an independent chairman just like there is at Apple, Google, Oracle, Twitter, and Microsoft and the dual-class share structure to be abolished. "The idea that there should be an autocrat in charge of a gigantic public company, which has billions of dollars of shareholder money invested in it, is an anachronism," said Patrick Doherty at the time. Doherty is the director of corporate governance at the office of the New York comptroller, which looks after more than $1 billion in Facebook stock. "It harks back to the 19th century when you had these robber barons who were autocrats and dictators."
SunSeeker
(51,502 posts)dalton99a
(81,385 posts)Zuckerberg himself controls 60%
lagomorph777
(30,613 posts)But individual users control 100% of Facebook's profits. If users walk, money talks.
RockRaven
(14,886 posts)I'm not saying the way Facebook is set up is good, but I'm pretty sure it has always been a matter of publicly available record to prospective shareholders what the terms are... You knew, or should have known, what you were buying. If you changed your opinion after buying, feel free to sell. Am I missing something? I hate FB/Zuck as much as the next person, but there's no bait-and-switch or other unfairness here. Just seems like the pouting of the uber-privileged.
Hekate
(90,526 posts)Zuck and his programmers surely can figure out how to make FB safe for democracy. The fact that he has not done so in the face of all the evidence is a crime.
BumRushDaShow
(128,371 posts)You don't have to go back that far. They have never gone away. Just got replaced with a new set. The WW2 MIC (that still exists) and certainly the vulture capitalists -
Every historical era has them, going back thousands of years.
bucolic_frolic
(43,027 posts)From dormitory to boardroom is a formidable journey. Whiz kid entrepreneurs even with Ivy degrees have destiny and ego as hurdles. Few are up to it, though some survive.
vercetti2021
(10,155 posts)Give him the Papa John treatment. Fuck Zuckerfuck.
2naSalit
(86,307 posts)that kid is helping despots ruin the world and working on possibly becoming one himself.
mopinko
(69,981 posts)if it passes, maybe i will hold it. if it fails, i will turn around and dump it.
Guy Whitey Corngood
(26,494 posts)the protocols on his emotions chip?
elmac
(4,642 posts)BadGimp
(4,012 posts)Not 100% bad but in the short term very bad.
I work in the online startup, tech, and social media space and Facebook is a new kind of beast. Zuck will need to step down son, but not today imo.
onenote
(42,531 posts)not that he mishandled them.
The evidence:
When the first "scandal" struck this past spring, FB stock dropped from 185 to 152 in less than a week. But it soon began climbing and over the next four months, it climbed nearly 43 percent, to over 217 a share -- its highest price ever. Then came yesterday's drop, in which the stock fell to around 176, still 16 percent higher than its March price.
Put another way, between March and yesterday, the Dow Jones climbed by seven percent; during that same period FB stock did six times better than that and, even after yesterday's loss, FB still bettering the market as a whole by a better than 2-1 margin.
The problem of course is that success breeds expectations and the unexpected success FB enjoyed compared to the rest of the market over the past four months undoubtedly has some investors thinking that a change in needed not that the elevator ride has slowed and to a certain extent reversed.
FakeNoose
(32,552 posts)Instructions are posted here:
https://www.democraticunderground.com/100210932047
This is in DU's General Discussion section, just posted today.