Elon Musk owns 12.3% of Class A shares and 93.6% of Class B shares. Class B shares have 10x the voting power of class A shares. Overall Elon controls 85.1% of the voting power in the company. If Elon sells any of his Class B shares, they automatically convert into Class A shares.
Retail and institutional investors will have practically no say in the direction of the SpaceX.
> Each share of Class A common stock will entitle its holder to one vote per share. Each share of Class B common stock will entitle its holder to 10 votes per share. Each share of Class B common stock will convert automatically into one share of Class A common stock upon a Transfer.
The S&P 500 index criteria didn’t allow this sort of nonsense starting in 2017, but they relaxed the rule again to allow dual class listings to be included in the index in 2023.
Not looking forward to SpaceX.AI.Twitter’s eventual inclusion, I do not like founder controlled publicly traded companies.
I can’t deny the effects that Google and Meta have had on my own index fund performance, and it looks like 8% of S&P 500 companies have that structure.
I do understand it provides stability for longer term leadership which is good, ideally there would be a sunset provision which converted the supervoting shares to normal shares after a certain amount of time.
I guarantee the reason that number is so high is so that SpaceX can offer to merge with Tesla and the end results will be Musk having over 50% control in the combined entity. He's been very clear that's what he's been attempting to do with via his compensation packages at Tesla and now he's found a different way of acheiving the same thing.
Retail and institutional investors will have practically no say in the direction of the SpaceX.
> Each share of Class A common stock will entitle its holder to one vote per share. Each share of Class B common stock will entitle its holder to 10 votes per share. Each share of Class B common stock will convert automatically into one share of Class A common stock upon a Transfer.