Meta has agreed to pay up to $17.1 billion to settle claims by 47 states and thousands of families making the case that Facebook and Instagram were engineered to addict children.
While the settlement appears to be a large sum, particularly for shareholders that will ultimately foot the bill, the number to understand in this story is 10. That’s the number of votes Mark Zuckerberg gets for every share held by an ordinary shareholder. He controls Meta through a dual-class stock system that gives him about 61% of the total voting power even though he owns just 13% of the company. Understanding that misalignment is the key to understanding how this corporate and global crisis happened in the first place.
