Facebook Loses Billions in 24 Hrs )} Is Zuckerberg on His Way Out?
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| Mr.Z 5 hrs ago as of thurs 4pm |
ByJon Swartz
Its shares falling off a proverbial cliff, Facebook (FB) faces immense pressure from investors as never before. [It's down more than 19%, to $175.21, today.]
No one is feeling more heat than Chief Executive Mark Zuckerberg, who is also chairman of the company he co-founded. On top of that, at least one investor wants to shut off the air conditioning.
Trillium Asset Management filed a shareholder proposal June 29 asking the company to remove Zuckerberg as chairman, weeks before the company announced disappointing results Wednesday. Its the latest among investors who want a change.
Six prominent Facebook shareholders, with nearly $3 billion in investments, already have let it be known they want an independent Facebook chairman following a string of scandals from Russian meddling in the 2016 presidential election to a data-analytics scandal with Cambridge Analytica, according to a recent report in Business Insider.
Zuckerberg, Facebook's chairman since 2012, has dual-class shareholdings that give him approximately 60% of Facebook’s voting shares.
"We believe this weakens Facebook's governance and oversight of management," Trillium, which owns 50,000 Facebook shares, says in its proposal. "Selecting an independent Chair would free the CEO to focus on managing the Company and enable the Chairperson to focus on oversight and strategic guidance."
"Google, Microsoft, Apple, Oracle, and Twitter have separate CEO and chairperson roles," the proposal continues. "More broadly, 59% of the S&P 1500 separated these roles as of April 2018."
Trillium is no stranger seeking change at the world's largest social-networking company. In April, it filed a shareholder proposal to create a risk-oversight committee overseeing privacy, cybersecurity, and impacts on society. The proposal was voted down May 31 at Facebook's annual shareholder's meeting, though the company created such a committee two weeks later.
All the murmurings of discontent are not entirely surprising to the embattled Zuckerberg.
During a conference call with reporters this spring in the aftermath of the Cambridge Analytica scandal, in which the personal information of tens of millions of users was filched, the press-shy Zuckerberg was bluntly asked if Facebook's board of directors had discussed replacing him as chairman.
"Not that I'm aware of," he tersely replied.
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