61–70 of 139 posts
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You're right.. Class A is traded publicly. Class B is what's owned by Sergey and Brin, and it has 10 votes per share (vs 1 vote per share for Class A), and allows them to outvote all Class A shares.
Sergey and Brin or Larry and Page? ;)
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Can someone then explain to a layman, why Google shares even have any value? What good is a share, if it's voting power in controlling the company is practically void? Google has never paid any dividend either. Are all the stock investors just speculating that GOOG will pay dividend in the future? Or is it possible that Class B shares will loose their special voting rights at some point so that Class A become instrum…
Well if you take away dividends and voting rights, what remains? I can think of two things: One, money for Google, at least when they were distributed shares (I don't know if they distribute more from time to time). Two, a tradeable product. Price determined by supply and demand, supply / demand generated by people wanting to bet the price goes up and people cashing in. Think Bitcoins.
This reminds me of stock buy-back programs. The company, using company revenues, to buy the company. Although now I understand them, when I first heard of them I immediately thought it would lead to a stack overflow...
Tldr: in the south sea bubble it did eventually lead to a stackoverflow
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Can someone then explain to a layman, why Google shares even have any value? What good is a share, if it's voting power in controlling the company is practically void? Google has never paid any dividend either. Are all the stock investors just speculating that GOOG will pay dividend in the future? Or is it possible that Class B shares will loose their special voting rights at some point so that Class A become instrum…
As with every company that maintains 51% private ownership, they have value because in the future someone might buy them from you for more than what you paid for them. Or, to put it another way, they have value because people will pay for them, and people will pay for them because they have value. Isn't finance ridiculous?
Other people will pay for them because the first group will pay for them. That's not ridiculous, that's just a transitive property of things being worth money. It's only a problem and a bubble insofar as this group's enthusiasm overwhelms the first group's.
I thought the share class structuring of Google was such that you can never own Google by buying its publicly traded shares?
Can someone then explain to a layman, why Google shares even have any value? What good is a share, if it's voting power in controlling the company is practically void? Google has never paid any dividend either. Are all the stock investors just speculating that GOOG will pay dividend in the future? Or is it possible that Class B shares will loose their special voting rights at some point so that Class A become instrum…
John C. Bogle has written angrily at length about this many times in the past. I don't know enough to say whether I agree with him or not, but "The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism" was a fun read. He basically pushes forward his thesis that many problems related to corporations and corruption have to do with a transition from "shareholder capitalism" to "manager capitalism".
I read it so long ago that I'm distorting things, but I will always remember that it was way better than the stupid title made it seem.
I thought the share class structuring of Google was such that you can never own Google by buying its publicly traded shares?
Can someone then explain to a layman, why Google shares even have any value? What good is a share, if it's voting power in controlling the company is practically void? Google has never paid any dividend either. Are all the stock investors just speculating that GOOG will pay dividend in the future? Or is it possible that Class B shares will loose their special voting rights at some point so that Class A become instrum…
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Well if you take away dividends and voting rights, what remains? I can think of two things: One, money for Google, at least when they were distributed shares (I don't know if they distribute more from time to time). Two, a tradeable product. Price determined by supply and demand, supply / demand generated by people wanting to bet the price goes up and people cashing in. Think Bitcoins.
I just have to ask. If it really is that way, what would prevent the maintainers of open source projects to issue (more or less worthless) "shares" of their projects? Could this be a way to pay open source developers?
Here in Australia a proprietary company can't take investment from (or even offer the opportunity to) more than 20 people in a 12 month period, can't have more than 50 non-employee shareholders, and the people you make the offer to have to be classified as "sophisticated" investors (which is a specific term that basically boils down to having a lot of money and thus probably not being naive to the way investments work.)
If you exceed those thresholds then you have to register a prospectus with the Australian Securities and Investment Commission and there are mountains of guidelines, laws, and red tape to wade through to meet all the criteria in the Corporations Act.
It would be far better for OS projects to sell upgrades to their software (to avoid having the complications surrounding donations) for a nominal fee, even if the upgrade is open source as well. The motivation to pay for the upgrade would be to keep the project alive rather than get the benefit of the upgrade.
It's like reddit gold, it doesn't do anything I can't already do with reddit enhancement suite for free, but I renew my gold subscription every year because I appreciate reddit and want to see it continue (Eternal September aside.)
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Well if you take away dividends and voting rights, what remains? I can think of two things: One, money for Google, at least when they were distributed shares (I don't know if they distribute more from time to time). Two, a tradeable product. Price determined by supply and demand, supply / demand generated by people wanting to bet the price goes up and people cashing in. Think Bitcoins.
I just have to ask. If it really is that way, what would prevent the maintainers of open source projects to issue (more or less worthless) "shares" of their projects? Could this be a way to pay open source developers?
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No shit, Sherlock?!
Thanks for your contribution.. This , vs . is often a problem, because my bank will issue tables with , used as decimal separator, but copying that into some tool everything breaks because it expects . to be used.
it is amazing, all those CS and other courses and still every new generation of (predominantly) US developers discover the fact that there is a world outside the US.
the most dominant data point to prove that software creation is still far away form being called a form of engineering. it's hacking, children throwing shit together then calling it "working".