This is subjective, there are companies that are mostly an investment vehicle and companies that have a strong motivation to make changes in the world. Investors, especially passive investors like pension funds that are only interested in returns, should know in advance what they are getting into and decide if they want to buy shares or not; it should not be "I will buy shares and try to change the company".
I worked for a company where activist investors bought enough shares to have influence, then practically messed up with the company in a way that today, 10-15 years later, the company is a shadow of what it used to be - fell from top positions in Fortune 500, share price is lower in inflation-adjusted money, management is extremely politized and unprofessional, most professionals left or retired. I don't think this is what we want from SpaceX, in the end this is the company that moved the needle in space launches and cost per launch/kg, it's not a ketchup company that not too many people will cry about.
As investors for other people, the pension funds, have a fiduciary responsibility to ask questions. I don't care if Space X is changing the world or making potato chips for consumers.
If you read the article, they have concerns about the governance structure of Space X and the ability of investors to question what the company is doing.
I think the investors should NOT invest if they don't like the governance structure. This is calling "voting with your wallet".
There is the problem. The fund managers have legal requirements on what they invest in. They don't get a choice in some cases. Which means they sometimes are forced to invest in companies they don't like. (often they had input into the law in years past, but they never imaged this situation and so the law doesn't cover it)
> there are companies that are mostly an investment vehicle and companies that have a strong motivation to make changes in the world.
And there are companies that are mostly an investment vehicle whose leaders spin their self-serving decisions as necessary to make changes in the world. Some of them might even be right! (that their decisions are better in the long run, and that ceding more control to shareholders would lead to better short term outcomes but far worse long term outcomes).
> it should not be "I will buy shares and try to change the company".
it should not be “I will go public and try to stop the public from exercising their rights as shareholders”...just stay private.
Or, if those business owners want to retain their right to make all the decisions, they should structure the shares like Meta or Alphabet.
Super voting shares were a mistake to allow in general.
Why? Accredited investors don't seem to mind, and they should be able to judge the pluses and the minuses.
Accredited investors did mind for the longest time; dual class shares were banned outright for like 40 years by the NYSE (and they'd declined to list individual companies before that because of investor outcry).
They only allowed them again in the 80s as part of the larger wave of "let's stop regulating capital".
For whatever reason, there are a few very successful businesses with super voting shares. If the alternative was to keep those businesses private, I do not know if that would have been better for the public.
Presumably, the market will price in the risks of super voting shares.
> For whatever reason
The reason is not "whatever".
Only very successful CEOs can negotiate super voting shares. In this context "successful" means "runs very profitable company".
If you're crap CEO (your company is not very profitable) then investors won't say "sure, you're crap CEO but we'll give you a complete control so that you can continue to be crap CEO".
Only when you're very successful you can negotiate complete control (which investors don't want to give unless they think they'll make lots of money).
And the best predictor of future success is past success.
Therefore companies run by CEOs with super voting shares were successful in the past and are more likely to be successful in the future.
More like if these funds have an issue with the management structure they should just not buy the shares.
Maybe Nasdaq shouldn't put Space X in the Nasdaq-100 index fund 15 trading days later vs six months.
Nasdaq is a company that exists to make money.
They make money by curating an index i.e. a list of companies and licensing that list to other companies for a fee.
If they pick good, profitable companies with great future, then the business continues. If not, the business fails.
So when you're debating "should/shouldn't", the only perspective is that of Nasdaq, the company, and they only question they "should" be interested in is: is SpaceX a good company with great feature that will make the list better.
The 6 month rule was created by Nasdaq, the company, in order to pick good companies. It's not a religion. It's not a suicide pact.
Therefore when faced with historic IPO (the largest IPO ever) it's a sign of good management that they are not applying the same rules to SpaceX (debuting at $1.75 Trillion) as they do to companies that IPO at $100 million.
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