alt Hacker NewsAre super shares like Zuckerberg's and Musk a new thing? Genuinely curious if they're a recent invention or something that's quietly happened for a while because it seems like a large inversion of the deal of going public, lose some control of the company in exchange for a large amount of cash but these nonvoting/supervoting share splits seem to completely upend what I understood to be part of the deal for access to the stock market.
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They were a thing in the previous 20's and the exchanges banned them in like the 40's (you could still have a dual-class corporate structure, you just wouldn't be listed on eg the NYSE), because investors thought that was some bullshit to have someone control a company while owning only a tiny slice of it.
That rule was dropped sometime in the 80s.
Ford has them. What it has meant for Ford-- and will probably mean for Facebook-- is that Zuck's heirs will control the company, for better or for worse.
The common justification for this is that for a media company (NYT) you want a person or family to take responsibility for the editorial content, not a pure profit seeker. Facebook has it both ways and typically denies it has editorial control.
IMO, the flaw of markets is that they are short sighted. Sometimes this allows states to outmaneuver them with a longer view. Current exhibit A: China. Historically state intervention has been worse in the long run. But who knows. If we went into a depression a lot of people may think state intervention is a better system, as many admired the USSR during the Great Depression.
Some media companies had them before the 1980s. New York Times issued dual class in 1969 so that the owning family maintained editorial control.
Berkshire Hathaway is possibly the most famous from the 80s/90s. The class A shares are significantly more expensive and proportionately even more powerful than the class B shares. The lower price version was important back when physical exchanges didn’t support fractional shares as they do today.
The New York Times Company operates under a dual-class stock structure where the Ochs-Sulzberger family holds roughly 95% of Class B shares. This family control allows them to elect 70% of the company's Board of Directors.
Copied from google's response to "new york times governance"
Google's AI also says that the NYT has had that structure since 1957.
Ford has something similar from the 1930s. (Dodge did too until it was bought.) Raylon (synthetic textiles) did it in the 1920s and the company behind Jack Daniels did it right after Prohibition.
Google says that the NYSE banned dual-class between 1926 and 1986; I don't know how to reconcile that with Ford.