As Elon looks enviously at Zuckerberg's super-voting shares.*
From Barron's January 18:
Meta is preparing the computer infrastructure to make artificial intelligence widely available.
....MOREOn Instagram Thursday, CEO Mark Zuckerberg said the company will have 350,000 Nvidia H100 graphics processing units and overall almost 600,000 H100 compute equivalent GPUs by the end of this year.
“Our long term vision is to build general intelligence, open source it responsibly, and make it widely available so everyone can benefit,” he wrote in the post. “We’re building massive compute infrastructure to support our future roadmap” for artificial intelligence. Zuckerberg also said he excited about Meta’s progress incorporating AI technology in other type of devices like its Ray Ban smart glasses.
Start-ups and enterprise have clamored for Nvidia ’s GPUs, or graphics processing units because they are well suited for the parallel computations needed for AI projects....
....Though, it is unknown at what price Meta can purchase the H100, a quantity of 350,000 at $25,000 per GPU comes to nearly $9 billion....
*I thought Zuckerberg had 58% of the company's votes but this piece at Observer, who are usually pretty good with the numbers says his 13% of the shares has 61% of the votes.
Zuckerberg says he has no plans to run for president: report (FB)Very related:
- Zeitgeist: "Zuckerberg’s control over Facebook ‘akin to a dictatorship,’ says California pension fund" (FB)
- "Surprise! Facebook Directors Weren't Villains" (FB)
- Reminder: Uber Founders Have Super-voting Shares
- Facebook's Investors Criticize Marc Andreessen for Conflict of Interest
- "Marc Andreessen Has a Pretty Creepy Relationship With Zuck" (FB)
- "Facebook investors yell at CEO: Get the Zuck out of our boardroom!" (FB)
- Reminder: Uber Founders Have Super-voting Shares
The rise of super-voting shares in Silicon Valley has given founders the ultimate job security.
As the calamities amass at Uber, many people — including me — have called for new leadership. Usually, the job of hiring and firing a CEO falls to a company’s board of directors. Yet in a March 21 phone call with the press, board member Arianna Huffington said that Uber’s board had not even discussed the matter.They had no reason to. At Uber, like at many of tech’s hottest startups, the board has little influence over who fills the top job. The only person who can decide Uber needs a new CEO is its cofounder and current CEO, Travis Kalanick.That’s due in part to the dual-class share structure that savvy tech founders have come to embrace in recent years. Essentially, in one class, a share carries one vote; in the other class, shares come with ten votes each or more. These super-voting shares allow founders and some early investors to maintain control over decisions the company makes, even if their ownership in the company is significantly reduced. Founders increasingly pair this strategy with smart management techniques when setting up a board to guarantee control in perpetuity.According to Uber’s articles of incorporation, the company has 11 board seats, nine of which carry super-voting shares. As of now, the company has filled only seven of those spots. Two outside investors hold super-voting seats. The others fall to Kalanick and two of his allies: Garrett Camp, a cofounder who is a non-executive chairman of the board, and early employee Ryan Graves. Kalanick has chosen to leave four super-voting seats empty, according to The Information. Were board members to counter Kalanick, he could simply fill the empty seats.This degree of control is not uncommon for the unicorn startup in 2017 — but it is a new phenomenon in tech companies generally. Less than two decades ago, founders were more likely to find themselves at the mercy of their investors and other board members. Conventional wisdom held that startup CEOs should make way for a professional CEO as a company grew. When investors negotiated investments, founders gave up portions of their stakes within companies, and by the final rounds, they often no longer controlled the board. Founders who were not performing could get the boot. Thus in 1985 when Steve Jobs clashed with John Sculley, Sculley brought the disagreement to the board, which authorized him to fire Jobs....MUCH MORE
