I dislike Zuckerberg as much as another fellow, but he is one of the few founder/CEOs who managed to not only maintain control of his company, but maintain complete, uncontested control over his company. There are so few businesspeople that can claim that, as it is typical that either fundraising or corporate politics (or both) eventually ousts the founding members or dilute their absolute power. To claim that he somehow accidentally negotiated and maintained complete control throughout the entire lifetime of Facebook is disingenuous at the very least. People do not accidentally maintain power. Any number of other ambitious people would have loved to become the power broker at Facebook by taking Mark down, and preventing that every step of the way is foundational to the definition of business savvy.
But he has uncontested control because of an unusual dual-class share structure. And isn't the explanation for Facebook's founder-favoring structure basically that Peter Thiel wanted it that way?
My recollection is that founder-favoring share structures go in and out of fashion historically, and that Facebook rose during a period when that was popular. So yes, props to young Mark Zuckerberg for pushing for that when it was achievable.
But even Mark Zuckerberg describes himself as lucky in this regard:
“So one of the things that I’ve been lucky about in building this company is ... I kind of have voting control of the company, and that’s something I focused on early on. And it was important because, without that, there were several points where I would’ve been fired. For sure, for sure,” https://www.cnbc.com/2019/10/03/zuckerberg-if-i-didnt-have-c...
It's far too rare for a founder to maintain control in that way while also growing the company to the size of Facebook is. For example, Basecamp has managed to maintain control but it's nowhere near their size.
