Meta: Shares in Facebook owner dive 20% as investors lose faith
22 points by max23_ 2 years ago | 19 comments- merricksb 2 years agoEarlier discussion:
- bpodgursky 2 years agoZuckerberg still holds absolute voting control over the stock. Unless it tanks enough that he can get legitimately sued, or employees quit en masse... I think all other shareholders need to settle in and enjoy the ride.
- ocdtrekkie 2 years agoI'm still shocked super voting shares are a structure that we decided as a society should even be legal. With some of the most powerful monopolies today being also controlled by people basically accountable to nobody, it feels really dystopian we can't remove them somehow.
- plorkyeran 2 years agoThat's more of an argument against private ownership of companies over a certain size than weird voting rules for shares. Zuckerberg has merely retained the power that he would have had if Facebook had stayed private.
If Meta does collapse due to Zuckerberg's missteps and there's a lot of very angry shareholders, it's possible that it'll result in this type of split-class voting shares becoming illegal. Financial regulations tend to be reactive rather than proactive, so things default to being legal until they very clearly are a problem.
- ocdtrekkie 2 years agoSort of, but public companies generally can grow much larger than private companies. There's something to be said for the fact that Zuckerberg is using a public company like his private company because it's architected to give everyone else less control. If it was all his money, fine whatever, but he's burning shareholder value and shareholders have no power to do anything about it, and that seems wrong, IMHO.
But yeah, I haven't checked, but to my knowledge split-class voting shares are relatively recent innovations? It may take some corporate collapses before any change is made to the regulations.
- ocdtrekkie 2 years ago
- bpodgursky 2 years agoI mean, nobody was obligated to buy minimally-voting shares of $FB.
Our legal system's default assumption is that contracts that aren't clearly exploitative are valid, and this seems pretty tame by that measure.
- ocdtrekkie 2 years agoI suppose. Perhaps this generation of technocrats burning their empires to the ground will make people more hesitant to invest in shares without power in future companies.
- ocdtrekkie 2 years ago
- plorkyeran 2 years ago
- johnwheeler 2 years ago7x earnings seems egregiously low. It’s gotta bump back up 20% within a month. This is a total mispricing of the stock
- helpfulclippy 2 years agoThey have one of the worst brand reputations in tech. Their business model in general is being targeted by regulators and policymakers in jurisdictions big and small all over the world, and the various abuses of their specific platform is often used as a clear example of why. TikTok is giving them very strong competition, and their efforts to play copycat are not being received well by users. Investors are now far less enamored with tech, and capital is tight in general since the economy is in a precarious situation. Their CEO is unaccountable, and people he relied on to build a successful business to begin with (eg. Sheryl Sandberg) are gone, and he’s spending all his focus on a completely different product that lacks traction. He insists on centering himself as a personality in media, despite the fact that he is uncharismatic and his appearances tend to reinforce the brand’s negative reputation.
Even if VR is the future, there’s no indication that Meta is the company that knows how to build something people want here, let alone profit it at, but it continues to pour massive amounts of money, talent and executive attention into this, and it sounds like they’re not planning to change course.
Meta has earned its price drop.
- johnwheeler 2 years agoWell, it also makes 40B a year, so, there’s that.
- johnwheeler 2 years ago
- hayst4ck 2 years agoI don't know about that. I want to see Facebook fail. I think the world would be a better place without Facebook. I am pretty confident I am not the only one who thinks that and I think the number of people who see things that way is increasing.
If I knew someone was engaging with Facebook, I would think less of them. In the same way Facebook grew due to social factors, it can also wither due to social factors.
Facebook has gotten so much negative press that I can't imagine there being anyone but mercenaries working there now.
I certainly would not invest in that.
Dictatorships work great until they don't. Dictators get high off of their yes men until they lose touch with reality and start making critical errors.
- midoridensha 2 years agoI'm no fan of Facebook either, but if they collapse and die one day soon, one thing I'll really miss is FB Messenger. I just haven't found anything remotely like it that works as well for keeping a friends list, letting me chat with them, and letting me do video chats, both on my phone and (very importantly) on a PC.
Everything else fails in some way, usually the PC part. Most chat apps have some video chat function, but it sucks and is totally useless because it's only on the phone; there's no way to do it on a PC, so what's the point? I don't want to see shaky video from someone holding their phone in their hand. I can chat with people using Zoom, but that's a pain because it requires a native application, it's only for video chats (not for keeping a long-running text chat), so while it's great for business meetings it sucks for personal use.
- kornhole 2 years agoI don't participate for ethical reasons which implies that I believe those who do are unethical, ignorant, or trapped. Some call me radical, but I take it as a compliment.
- midoridensha 2 years ago
- trophycase 2 years agoYes and no, alternatively if investors believe the trend will continue then they will just wait for the earnings to come down and then it isn't mispriced.
- streetcat1 2 years agoor not.
- helpfulclippy 2 years ago
- ocdtrekkie 2 years ago