Who actually controls a company — not who works there, but who makes the big calls? In most public companies, that question has a simple answer: whoever owns the most stock. One share, one vote. But some of the most powerful companies on earth are built on a different answer entirely.

When a company goes public — meaning it sells shares to outside investors for the first time — the founders typically give up a chunk of ownership in exchange for cash. Enough rounds of this, and a founder can end up owning a minority of their own company. Under normal rules, that means they can be outvoted. Outvoted means fired. Larry Page and Sergey Brin watched that happen to Steve Jobs at Apple in 1985 and decided they weren't going to let it happen to them.

The mechanism is called dual-class shares. Before going public, a company creates two categories of stock. Class A shares go to outside investors: one share, one vote, normal. Class B shares stay with the founders: one share, ten votes. Sometimes twenty. When Google went public in 2004, Page and Brin (and later Eric Schmidt) held Class B shares worth ten votes each. Investors who bought in at IPO got Class A — one vote each. The public owned most of the company's economic value. The founders owned most of the control. Those are different things, and keeping them separate is the whole game.

The argument for this structure is straightforward: founders think long-term, markets don't. If Zuckerberg had to answer to a shareholder vote every time he made an unpopular bet, Facebook might never have bought Instagram for $1 billion in 2012 — a deal that looked insane at the time and turned out to be one of the best acquisitions in tech history. Dual-class shares insulate founders from short-term pressure. The argument against is just as straightforward: it insulates them from accountability entirely. When things go wrong — and sometimes they do — there's no mechanism to remove the person responsible. WeWork's Adam Neumann held supervoting shares that let him steer a company into near-collapse while remaining unchallengeable. He eventually left, but only because his own investors convinced him to — not because shareholders could force him out. That's the tradeoff baked into the structure: you get visionary leadership when the founder is right, and you get no recourse when they're not.