Zuckerberg owns Facebook in a way that no other major company (to my knowledge) is owned. He is a monarch that can override any and all board politics. While power sloshes around in other companies by tug of war, Zuckerberg's word is final. Given this, I don't think it's unusual that Zuckerberg would stick around. He, with Facebook, explore new possibility space in how a company can be run that few other companies in history can access.
> Zuckerberg owns Facebook in a way that no other major company (to my knowledge) is owned. He is a monarch that can override any and all board politics.
So can brin/page. They own more than 50% of the voting rights of alphabet. Zuckerburg modeled facebook's IPO and voting share structure after Google's IPO and their share structure.
Maybe he doesn't want that power, though. People start to do weird things to please a supreme leader.
Here's a story from my first couple months at Google. When I joined, I worked on payments. We were about to launch a new credit card thing. I honestly don't remember what value this had to anyone, but it seemed like a big deal at the time. Anyway, one morning we all gathered into a conference room to hear "an update" on the project after a review with Larry Page -- we're doing a total rewrite on everything, because we were switching the network that processed the cards. Why? Because at the review, Larry made a face when told the name of the network that processed the cards. Note that nobody in this meeting was at the meeting with Larry Page. We were throwing away a partnership and thousands of hours of work because someone said someone else saw Larry make a face.
(We did switch networks. The new network was more popular, but with that popularity came so many restrictions that the product could no longer do what we originally intended. It failed. Fortunately, nobody cared, because who ever even asked for a credit card from Google anyway?)
My point is, do you want one random grimace to control the fate of an entire organization? Probably not. But that's how people treat authority figures. You have to do some serious work to get people to talk, rather than to react. So maybe he just opted out of that after seeing it play out over and over again.
If you are feeling less charitable: the Eye of Sauron looks into a particular corner of Mordor and the orcs in that corner suddenly start scurrying harder.
You mean in terms of a publicly-held company, right? Because there are plenty of massive corporations still privately owned that are controlled by one person or one family.
Right. Facebook, a young and suddenly influential company is a very different thing then the very large privately held companies. Those are usually very old, owned by multiple family interests, or associated with a government.
The way Elon Musk put it, who rarely says stuff that doesn't sound completely crazy, is that his grandchildren will be running Facebook. It's truly totally crazy.
I was going to point out that BMW is still family run...but then again, I realize that BMW isn't also a publicly traded company...and subject to public regulation thereof...
