> I can’t see myself putting the same work in to help the world’s richest man pay the loans he took out So Twitter was “really good” (while it was helping the many rich shareholders of a random public company) but it’s suddenly “work” a couple of days after the owner changed? Nothing wrong for not using it because of ideological reasons, but the product’s accessibility (or anything else really) hasn’t changed yet.
I think you’ll find a small percentage owned by rich private individuals/family offices, some owned by private investors like insurance companies, and the rest held by pension funds or mutual funds which look like big shares on paper but don’t really exercise control and correspond to lots of tiny holdings by people who range from poor to ordinary to a small number of quite wealthy people.
That is, I think the usual answer to “who are the shareholders of this public company?” is “ordinary people through their pensions or investment accounts, skewing a little bit older and richer”. Some companies have a relatively large stake owned by some private person or fund, and others have a big share owned by their original founders or their families, but in that case those people would be named instead of just saying ‘shareholders’.