Honestly this arrangement (total comp aside) is how it should be for all these companies. When Facebook went public the dual class structure (and Zuck retaining voting control) was a big point of contention.
You're describing the opposite scenario. Generally it's the founders who get a special class of shares which allows them to retain control over the company even when they own <5% of the stock. Without that the company becomes controlled by Wall St. who appoint the MBA to loot and pillage.
The MBAs get there often because it's who the board picks when the founder retires.
The main thing the special class of shares does is make it hard for them to oust the founder when the founder doesn't want to retire. Once they choose to, they either use their special votes to choose a worthy successor, or they stop caring and you get the default MBA you'd have had regardless.
> Honestly this arrangement (total comp aside) is how it should be for all these companies.
It's difficult to say based on the actual data in the past 10 years. The companies with dual shares seem to do well if we look at the companies of the same sizes.
The scenario in which dual-share structures can be a problem is if things don't go well. Specifically they greatly limit the shareholder's ability to protect their investment by removing the CEO. That's why it's considered poor governance.
In the end it comes down to leverage, Zuck famously didn’t sell early so people were pounding down the door to invest when they finally got the opportunity.
I understand Zuck made many failed bets but he had a few big bets paid off. And those big bets paid off so well that FB is a $1.4 trillion company.
It's like people here are still stuck in school where you have to score A+ on every subject.
Fair, I just remember the backlash to the FB arrangement more I guess. At least in the case of the Google Class B shares control was split between the two, but still, in my opinion, wildly inappropriate for the purpose of public markets.
I may have an antiquated view of how the capital market should work given how long I’ve worked in the space, but I’m strongly of the opinion that going public should be synonymous with surrendering private/individual control of the company. The company is effectively spreading the risk of failure, and I think the average investor doesn’t appreciate or understand the voting vs non-voting differentiation.
Then again there is a monstrous amount retail participants in the market don’t understand and frankly the SEC has done (in permitting these sorts of listings) a poor job of executing on its mandate.
There's certainly a hypothetical principal-agent risk if someone holds voting power / control without holding any financial risk. In practice, holders of preferred voting power shares usually also have financial interests at stake, and thus are aligned with long-term financial interests.
Proposals that forbid holding control shares without parallel financial interests are more compelling than proposals to outlaw multiple share classes in public companies in general, but again, I think you'd be hard-pressed to find cases where having the law would force de-facto changes, and then the question becomes whether the law is worth its compliance costs.
It's not really surprising that companies that print huge amounts of money with fairly little need for funding do well.
When you buy a fund, you’re choosing its management strategy (including about votes). If you don’t feel a fund represents your interests well, don’t buy it.
Sometimes your employer gives you a list of a couple dozen funds run by the same manager, and if you want your employer to contribute to your retirement savings, those are the options.
Banning these super-voting companies from 401(k) and index funds would have deprived many low- and middle-income people of those superb returns.
But hey less competition for the houses and stuff, right? We don't want more average people to enter the upper middle class.
I'm not against forbidding index/401K funds from investing in those companies since many people deem those companies as "bad".
Many average people don't actively manage their funds. Based on the past data, they would've missed out on the benefits, but that's okay.
Having shareholder voting power is more important for them, I suppose. While I disagree, I might have voted for the ban. Because this would've translated to less competition for house and stuff.
Also having been more capital intensive and founded further back, Jensen had less sway in the early days of the company and may have put off using the growth to his advantage.
Well, bigger than that, but yeah. The early 2020 market cap for NVDA was ~150B, vs. ~1.3T for AAPL. They were the dominant semiconductor design house in an important but still fairly niche area of the PC marketplace.
Another theory is that Nvidia doesn’t want their ceo to sleep with business partners and subordinates?
Which one do you think sounds more likely?
The fact that him staying is even a considerable possibility, although made much smaller by the second affair if it is true, is a testament to that.
Combining these roles is extremely poor governance, and it shouldn’t be legal but unfortunately it is.
I love Taco Bell though, so she is probably doing a good job.
I won't trust anything you say. I have seen what I needed to.
There are two actual taquerias less than 100 feet from where I am writing this comment that make food in a completely different league from Taco Bell (which is neither authentically Mexican nor gourmet). It is, however, a shining beacon of multicultural deliciousness and a bona fide American institution. I will not stand for Taco Bell slander and strongly encourage you to reconsider your stance.
Think outside the bun.
Doesn't have to be spies (which in this case is just conjecture anyway, and likely just trying to get him for political reasons).
When big changes happen, it's because multiple vectors have aligned. One isn't enough.
When Congress starts having hearings about your affair, you have fucked up but good, as they say.
That is The American Way.
Nvidia benefited from the AI boom by being right place, right time. And just yesterday, Mythos ported itself to AMD cards, showing there's no moat.
Self driving cars are poised to be huge, Nvidia simply didn’t have good execution or plan there because they focused on the hardware rather than data collection. Not sure how the ARM acquisition attempt was an unforced error. Data centers are buying Nvidia GPUs and AMD CPUs. Could have been Nvidia both. It was just in an unfavorable political climate.
I can't speak to why AMD is so massively incompetent or why they weren't a factor in driving a competitor.
A factor that might not be obvious is that in 2012 CUDA was mostly a commercial failure. Aside from some penetration into oil and gas HPC and things like physics acceleration in games, there wasn't much traction.
Beg your pardon? what does this mean?
https://developer.nvidia.com/gpugems/gpugems3/part-vi-gpu-co...
But as a counterpoint: AMD is very similar but hasn't benefitted nearly as much. They've been plastering "AI" all over their webpage for years, with little to show for it. So maybe there was something that Nvidia was doing right.
They've benefitted from being in the right place, but being there was not (or, not only) luck.
Compare to AMD which did not do that and has not had the same level of benefit from the AI wave despite everyone obviously wanting a competitor to create price pressure.
There would be no AI boom without Nvidia, their cards were instrumental to making it possible, that's why they're so dominant.
Anyone who thinks otherwise is welcome to try and get AMD cards working.
Instead of asking for elaboration ask yourself why you believe that the success of companies hinges on the qualifications of their CEOs? To the best of my knowledge no one has ever shown any correlation between CEO "quality" and company performance for a publicly traded company.
Sculley, Spindler, and Amelio were unmitigated disasters.
Before that, he was known for spending most of his time, polishing his private plane.
He's been behaving like a sugar hyped child over the last 15-20 years imho.
Maybe his idea of asserting control is less about voting rights and more about family allegiance.
I think nepotism is toxic behaviour when you are talking about publicly quoted firms and especially one the size of nv.
Fiddling whilst Rome burns is not a good look and should be punished.
Huang's net worth is over $200B, high enough to be in the world top-ten. He has been very well compensated by Nvidia. Either he decided he has enough money at some point or his current compensation numbers are just marketing. The real numbers were clearly much higher in the past, if not presently.
I suspect he's going quietly because the scandals haven't finished emerging yet[1]. At this point, it wouldn't surprise me if somebody has photos of secret Nvidia bunga bunga parties. I do find it interesting that Americans will tolerate lies, murder, and all sorts of other things from their highest elected officials but, if a CEO is revealed to be overly randy, he's got to go.
______________
[1]https://www.businessinsider.com/kimberly-powell-nvidia-exec-...
For all the complaints about him you can't argue he hasn't delivered a lot of value. Lots of corp CEOs make more with falling company performance and valuation, because they aren't really paid for performance.
Lies are one thing, but murder?
He could've gave us seamless private cloud GPUs (basically let you run anything on any device, rent out your GPU to earn money, let you play GTA-6 on your phone...)
Could've had the true AI App Store
Could've bought OpenRouter (instead Stripe bought them):
Have not just cloud gaming but the true cloud App Store where Claude and ChatGPT are just apps
This way no terrorist can smuggle Jensen's physical shovels aka GPUs in a potato bag ;-)