alt Hacker News> Shareholders will have no say in how the company is run. If and when he makes a mess of things, they will find it very hard to sue him because of various waivers. The board – that entity that is supposed to look out for shareholders - is loaded with Musk loyalists.
Does anyone seriously believe that an independent board of investors can deliver better results than a founder?
If you look at the companies that built the most amount of wealth in the last 20 years, from Meta, Google, Tesla, Alphabet, Nvidia, what many of them share is more or less singular control by the people in charge. Sometimes its super-voting shares but other times its just founder mentality and ability to make big bets and set the direction.
The rest of the article is similarly non-sensical. Everyone will be forced to buy it but it's going to crash! The prior investors will sell their shares! The IPO is an exit mechanism!
Replies
Thats the definition of cherry picking and survivorship bias
I’d be genuinely curious about the data on this.
There are examples I can think of with a more traditional governance structure that did well: Apple, Amazon, Microsoft.
Alphabet owns Google, why did you list them seperately? Why is Microsoft not included? Why is Apple not included?
Pretty insane to then claim the article is non sensiscal.
Correct, everyone complains about "enshittification" but they fail to recognize that the most egregious cases occur when a company with a dedicated founder/leader transitions to rule by committee.
You're assuming cause and effect run in that direction, but arguably companies that do well are going to have stable leadership. Governance matters when things go of the rails. There is also the matter of how well these companies would have done with alternative leadership. They might be running well under capacity. Finally the stock prices are a terrible metric since they are based on sentiment. See various meme stocks.
Companies that are 80, 100, 200 years old or more have trouble with founders dying.
One of the disadvantages of relying on the founder is that founders die. If I'm trying to keep a fund going for the next 100 years, investing in a company that relies exclusively on a person who will be dead within 100 years seems problematic.