Tech founders control their firms through extreme dual-class voting structures.

Evidence

In 2017 Snap’s IPO offered only nonvoting shares, leaving its founders with 70 percent control of all votes and the remainder in the hand of pre-IPO investors. … Other IPOs featured super-voting shares with as many as thirty to ten thousand times as many votes per share as the ordinary class of stock. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1900

Categorization

• XREF: Extends the dual-class voting discussion to Snap and extreme super-voting, deepening the pattern from paragraph 1897. — connects to: Google’s founders controlled corporate decisions through super-voting shares. — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 1897; Google’s dual-class share structure insulated founders from market and investor pressures — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 322; Dual-class shares freed founders to buy unprofitable startups for behavioral surplus — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 328 (+1 more)

Broader Connections

• Google’s dual-class share structure insulated founders from market and investor pressures #exemplifies (0.95) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 322
• Dual-class shares freed founders to buy unprofitable startups for behavioral surplus #expands (0.88) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 328
• Dual-class share structures spread from Google across Silicon Valley within a decade #exemplifies (0.80) — Shoshana Zuboff, The Age of Surveillance Capitalism, 325