Plan to Remove Zuckerberg as Facebook Chairman

Ever since it last lost $120 billion in value after releasing earnings, FB has done everything but recovered from that disaster. The stock is currently trading around $160, having dropped from its all-time high close of $217.5 the day before it released earnings on July 25th. I am not so much of technicals kind of person but that resistance line at around $149 is worth watching out for.

And if Mark Zuckerberg thought it couldn't get any worse, how about you tell him that a bunch of his shareholders is planning on dropping him from his Chairman role. The list of shareholders includes both private and public funds and the plan would be for Facebook to name an independent board chair instead of Zuckerberg. The shareholders believe that Zuckerberg has dealt with the recent controversies, such as Russia's meddling during the 2016 election, the Cambridge Analytica privacy scandal and the recent data breach that affected over 30 million users, in a very poor fashion.

But it is believed that such a move won't really have much of a practical effect, considering that Zuckerberg has control over 60% of Facebook's voting shares. The idea behind such a move is that he would be able to focus on running the company as CEO instead of worrying over these kinds of controversies. Facebook's lead independent director dismissed the need for such a move. She believes that dropping Zuckerberg would end up taking a toll on the company's performance.

It's always brutal when your shareholders no longer want to see you as chairman to the company you built from scratch. It would be interesting if such a move ends up materializing and even more interesting to see whether it would actually end up benefitting the company or not.