The CEO and founder of Facebook, Mark Zuckerberg has disclosed during an internal meeting that had he not had controlling shares in Facebook, he may have been fired by now due to contradicting viewpoints on running the Company.
The 35-year-old billionaire’s comment was published on The Verge from the Q & A session with employees which lasted close to two hours.
According to him, Facebook may have gone a different route as many shareholders at the time wanted for the company to be sold to Yahoo in 2006 and get their money back, a decision he could only stave off due to his majority shareholder status.
He also made reference to the change in algorithm in 2018 which determines what appears on users feeds to ensure more tailored social interactions, another decision he may not have been able to make if he didn’t have controlling shares of the Organization. A decision which resulted in a loss of $100 Billion of Market Capital in a single day, the lowest drop the founder expressed any business could have suffered.
It is not news that other shareholders have groaned over the controlling shares Zuckerberg owns and how much he earns, for the three platforms – Facebook, Instagram and Whatsapp as he controls over 60 percent of voting shares.
“It’s [Zuckerberg’s] very humanity that makes his unchecked power so problematic,” Chris Hughes wrote in an op-ed for The New York Times in May. “Mark’s influence is staggering, far beyond that of anyone else in the private sector or in government. He controls three core communications platforms — Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp — that billions of people use every day. Facebook’s board works more like an advisory committee than an overseer, because Mark controls around 60 percent of voting shares.”
“Mark alone can decide how to configure Facebook’s algorithms to determine what people see in their news feeds, what privacy settings they can use and even which messages get delivered,” Hughes wrote.
However, for Zuckerberg who believes success comes from the ‘freedom to fail’ taking away that privilege seems to great a risk for the Software founder considering how Steve Jobs was unfairly dismissed from the company he founded.