There's a little known alternative: Steward-ownership [1]. It's the kind of structure used by Novo Nordisk, Bosch or Patagonia.
LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a company’s control stays with long-term stewards (founders, employees, or a mission-aligned foundation) while profits are limited and the company cannot be sold for private gain. The goal is to protect the mission permanently."
The key, if I understand properly, is that these company cannot be sold (not even by the founders), so there is no "shareholder value" per se to maximize. It is also probably not a good way for founders to maximize their net worth, which is probably why it's not more popular...
The comment you replied to was just pointing out that, like how a founder-held company can get stuck pursuing the founder's obsession, a stock market held company can also single-mindedly pursue quarterly gains to the detriment of long-term health.
Plenty of countries have corporate laws that are less shareholder focussed than those of america. In the Netherlands for example boards are obligated to take into account broader sets of interest such as employee in their decisions and this is enforceable in court.
This model, unfortunately, often leads to a "well, we might as well spend the extra profits on executive benefits"-issue. Whenever you have money without oversight, you always face a moral hazard.
If the company makes a profit and there aren't shareholders there to keep the stewards in check, excesses can and do develop.
I get the first point, but having shareholders doesn't solve that in any way. Shareholders would just give themselves payouts instead of letting the execs take everything as bonuses. And unlike the execs, whose bonuses could be limited by charter and who could be chosen on the basis of trust, shareholders are "whoever has the most money to throw around", so there's no mechanism to align them with company values.
So it's not perfect, but it sure as hell beats having shareholders.
Precisely, in the form of the #1 trend of public companies, stock buybacks! I've seen aggressive buybacks take a company with a ton of money in the bank and a profitable business and drive it right to Chapter 7 bankruptcy in just a few short years.
I'll make you a deal. You agree to give me a trillion dollars, but only if I make you 8 trillion dollars.
I don't think he'll deliver and I think it's based on fantasy economics, he's been really losing it recently, but as a deal it's not entirely irrational if he could make it happen.
The thing is, the compensation is only based on it happening, not on him making it happen. “I make you 8 trillion dollars” rests on a strong assumption that it all comes from the CEO.
This particular CEO is on the more influential end of the spectrum, but I think executives generally get too much credit for outcomes. If this does happen, it won’t just be because of the CEO, but also because of ~100,000 other employees. Their contribution might be smaller, but comparing compensation, I don’t think it’s proportionally smaller.
Speaking honestly as a foot soldier employee, I look around myself and I think you could swap out most of the people around me, including me, for most other people in our industry and the company would continue just fine. In fact that happens naturally over time anyway. The work we do is essential, but as individuals we are not essential. If I quit and move on, how many investors will reconsider their position in my company? Give me a break, and they would be right to not care.
It's about leverage. It's all about where you stand and how long your lever is. Musk stands at the top and he has a very long set of levers. He's also much more closely personally involved in engineering aspects of a company that most CEOs know little to nothing about. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad, because his decisions have massively outsized effects because of this. Leverage.
If Musk makes good or bad decisions over the next few years, that matters much, much more than the decisions of anyone else at Tesla, especially because he hires and fires everyone else at Tesla. They're all only there, as individuals in particular, because of him anyway.
As it happens I think his decision making has deteriorated significantly recently, in some respects but not all. Also Tesla just doesn't have the magic special sauce SpaceX has had since they developed reusability. There's no special engineering insight in the Tesla architecture. Other vehicle manufacturers already caught up. That catch up is happening in space tech as well with BO's recent booster recovery, but SpaceX still has a very significant lead there, based on a truly revolutionary concept (which Musk championed personally) that they had exclusively for 10 years. Starship still doesn't work though, so we'll see.
I can't help but notice you said you could swap out most of the people around you, not all. Yeah, some random salesperson is not contributing enormously to the company's growth and could be replaced without much difficulty. But that's not true of everybody. The CEO is not uniquely special in this regard.
I agree that the CEO is typically the most important in this respect, especially this particular CEO. I just think that giving him an additional 1/8th of the company's entire market cap growth, on top of the roughly 1/8th he already has, is highly disproportionate.
Clearly the shareholders disagree, and that's entirely their right. And I'm not surprised, CEOs are greatly overvalued in general.
Steward-ownership is a philosophy more than an actual structure, my understanding is that each such company is in practice structured somewhat differently.
For Patagonia a trust owns 100% of the voting rights, while a charity collects 100% of the dividends. I don't doubt that there are ways the structure could be subverted, but it's a far cry from "money without oversight".
Do you have examples of Steward-owned companies that ended up with "well, we might as well spend the extra profits on executive benefits"-issues?
(I personally think Steam should go in that direction, otherwise I'm afraid enshittification is unavoidable once Gabe Newell is no longer at the helm)
Huh, fascinating.
The Patagonia structure is actually strikingly similar to the Bosch model - non-profit owning the shares, but no voting rights, trust having voting rights but no shares - just taking it to the logical 100% conclusion without the residual influence of the Bosch family (having retained a few percent in both).
The model has worked well for many decades for a 100 billion$ revenue company like Bosch, good to see others taking a cue from them.
(Also goes to show that even constructs like these are not safe from corporate fuckups - see the emissions scandal...)
Shareholders are not an effective check in most cases. They are with private companies where individual shareholders have a lot at stake - its their money that is being wasted.
If they can just easily sell the shares they will do that instead.
NASA once offered the UK to launch its satellites almost for free. That offer was rescinded as soon as the UK abandoned its national space program. [1]
From a European perspective, it’s impossible to look at the current situation and believe it would be the same without Ariane 6, even if Ariane 6 itself isn’t particularly competitive. Sovereign access to space is invaluable. Once you lose it, you hand an extraordinary amount of leverage to the White House. And make no mistake: that leverage will be used, whatever the color of the administration.
Yes, that’s not the point I was trying to make, though. But in a way Arianespace doesn’t really need to innovate or compete because because they’ll always have funding due to these legitimate strategic reasons
I agree with your sentiment, but let's not rewrite history too much. Snow Leopard didn't have any new feature, but under the hood it was a massive undertaking IIRC: it introduced a 64-bit kernel and 64-bit system applications like Finder, Mail, Safari, etc. It also replaced many 32-bit system frameworks. Until Snow Leopard MacOS X was still mostly 32 bits.
When Snow Leopard came out it was very buggy, and many apps simply did not run on it. I've been a Mac user since 1993, and I think it's the only version of macOS I ever downgraded from. Don't get me wrong, it eventually became rock solid, the apps I needed were eventually upgraded, and it became a great OS.
But let's not mistake MacOS 10.6.8 for MacOS 10.6.0. And maybe let's not compare macOS 26.0 to MacOS 10.6.8 either, it's not quite fair. Ever since Snow Leopard I've been waiting at least 6 months before upgrading macOS. I don't intend to change that rule anytime soon...
Sarkozy was not the only one sentenced to jail in that trial: Claude Guéant and Brice Hortefeux were also convicted, receiving sentences of six years and two years, respectively.
And then there are the many other trials involving Sarkozy and those around him...
I've been building AltStack.jp, a curated directory of Japanese digital services (cloud hosting, registrars, email providers, and more) all operated in Japan, by Japanese companies.
It’s aimed at people who want to be less dependent on foreign platforms, especially with the current shift away from globalization.
Still early days: only about 20% of the planned categories are up so far.
I've been working on AltStack.jp [1], a curated directory of Japanese digital services (think cloud hosting, registrars, email providers, etc.), all made and operated in Japan. It’s for anyone in Japan looking to reduce reliance on foreign (especially US-based) platforms, inspired by projects like European-Alternatives.eu.
The site itself is built with Astro, content is written in Markdown. It's still very much a work in progress: the design’s evolving, search isn’t done yet, and I’ve only scratched the surface with a handful of categories out of the dozens I have planned.
I think another factor is real estate: a population shrinking by more than half a million people per year eases some of the pressure on rent and land value...
When I lived in New York City (before COVID), I saw many local businesses get priced out of my neighborhood, only to be replaced by high-margin chains like Starbucks/H&M/etc. They were the only ones who could afford the rent!
Just two days ago: "F-35 Had To Maneuver To Evade Houthi Surface-To-Air Missile", "Several American F-16s and an F-35 fighter jet were nearly struck by Houthi air defenses" [1]
They also shot down seven MQ-9 drones [2].
I don't know how close Houthis were to actually shoot down that F-35 (probably not that close). But if their Iranian SAMs can threaten F-35s, what can state of the art Chinese or Russian systems do? Could NATO even establish air superiority in Ukraine?
Losing air assess is a given. Package Q alone lost two F-16s. We lost an F-117 in Bosnia. But run enough Wild Weasel and eventually we did establish air superiority.
In Ukraine there is no establishing superiority without occupying Russian territory.
I used to draw mushroom clouds against hills in the 80s. I do not want to see NATO in Russia. I only want Russia out of Ukraine.
I don't disagree with what you are saying, and tactics also evolve a lot during conflicts.
But my point is that the actual effectiveness of US forces against top-tier Russian or Chinese integrated air defense systems is unknown. And getting more unknown by the day rather than less.
I would say though that we can probably look at the Ukraine war and understand how their air defense systems are working. And the answer to that seems to be: not as well as previously assumed, they do work but have been vulnerable. This is mainly the S300 and S400. I couldn't find much about the newest system, Russia isn't able to do much manufacturing of the most complex weapons at the moment. If I had a guess, based on what we've seen in Ukraine, US forces would shred the Russians in the air and water, but ground forces would be far behind when it came to drone warfare. I'm just a chump sitting at home though so...
China is a whole other story and honestly I'm ok never finding out that answer.
Commas and dots being swapped is fairly common on continental Europe: I think it's the case at least in Germany, France, Spain and Italy. Probably other countries as well.
Since we're talking about numbers, in France we used to count by blocks of 20, and the usage somewhat persists to this day: so, for instance, 72 is read "sixty twelve" (60+12), 81 is read "four twenty one" (4x20+1), and 96 is read "four twenty sixteen" (4x20+16). Mind bending for the poor French learners...
Indeed, this one. But was it known to the pilots? The other dangerous obstacles you mention tend to be known and visible, not hidden and unexpected (against best practices).
The pilots didn't have to land there, they could have attempted a US Airways Flight 1549 rather than aiming at a piece of reinforced concrete.
LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a company’s control stays with long-term stewards (founders, employees, or a mission-aligned foundation) while profits are limited and the company cannot be sold for private gain. The goal is to protect the mission permanently."
The key, if I understand properly, is that these company cannot be sold (not even by the founders), so there is no "shareholder value" per se to maximize. It is also probably not a good way for founders to maximize their net worth, which is probably why it's not more popular...
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Steward-ownership