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Technology news was interesting this week. The fact that we started the week learning that Musk had bought a material percentage of the company's stock, and that he had joined the board by the end of Friday, made employees very interested in the matter.
The saga has given us a lot to think about. I want to talk about the matter again today through the lens of voting rights.
Multi-class shares at startup are something we have seen in the last few years. Multi-class shares are created when investors and founders create a class of equity that gives them more votes per unit of stock than other types of company stock. concentrating power in fewer hands is one of the things this does. Multi-class share setup can ensure that a founder has complete control of the company forever.
One such company is Facebook. It is not.
There is a difference between the two companies. The leader that brought Facebook to early success is struggling to find a new direction while, at the other end of the spectrum, the leader of the company that started it, is now running it. These results are different for publicly traded social networks.
What is making me laugh is brought to us by this. Those most in favor of using multi-class shares to control companies are those who are enthralled with Musk and his brand of capitalism. The people who see little issue with Facebook's CEO holding all the cards are also excited about what Musk can do at Twitter.
It's an example of intellectual dissonance, and one that forces me to ask a question, because I think corporate governance that looks like monarchy is a poor choice over a long time horizon.
Nope. Not really. Even if some people find him distasteful, he is doing activist shareholder things, which is fine.
What will Musk bring to the conversation? Who knows? It will be entertaining.
Ron Miller wrote about a project that will allow people to write code by having a conversation with a computer. You should read it. It reminded me of a method to suggest code to developers that was recently built by GitHub. It appears that tools are coming for boring development work.
Tech from Microsoft andSalesforce will not replace developers. The work that they do will remain in demand. Code-writing tools from the perspective of people who don't write code daily, but need to at times do their job should be considered. The market appears to be clearing obstacles for them.
10 investors discuss the no-code and low-code landscape in Q1 2022
Between the rise of no-code and low-code services, and the above work regarding more automated code-generation, we are slowly moving toward a future where development work will be more in the grasp of the beginner, and even more for the dabbler. A lot of human potential could be unlocked by this. Maybe the developer shortage can be lessened on a modest basis.
I am excited about this part of tech work. Let people have more power. It will be a good thing.
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