Ben Gilbert: belief

Transcript context

…Yeah. So historically a bunch of media companies have had this. News Corp has had it, The New York Times and a bunch of others. For whatever reason, it was in vogue with publishers and media companies at some point in the 20th Century. And tech companies have really sort of taken this tool and run with it. But this is breaking the ground here. So the thing about those other IPOs, Facebook, Google, even the media companies like usually there’s a 10:1 voting structure where each share of the founder’s stock or the CEO stock has 10 votes to every 1 of the public stock. There’s a market for those stocks if the founders and CEOs sell the stock, then you can buy that with separate voting shares. That’s important because not for individual’s voting necessarily but like activist hedge funds have made use of this to amass a voting bloc in a stock and then use that to agitate to try and get a representative elected to the board of directors. It’s been a tool they’ve used. So Snap says – And for other reasons too. Like Carl Icahn has done this with Apple and I think with eBay to advocate for a buyback or a distribution. More dividends or all sorts of things. And there’s a view probably not unjustified that that's really an annoying thing that you want to avoid. But this is an extreme case of no, you get no votes. Not now, not ever.…

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