Facebook CEO Mark Zuckerberg Allegedly Plans To Enter Politics; Text Exchanges With Marc Andreessen Made Public; Zuckerberg Allegedly Power Hungry?

By R. A. Jayme - 10 Dec '16 05:20AM
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Billionaire and Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg has been allegedly planning to enter the world of government politics.

Based on the court documents seen by Bloomberg, Zuckerberg allegedly indirectly express his plans to participate into government. In the current lawsuit, Facebook board member  Marc Andreessen is being accused by investors of failing to represent their interests.

As part of the legal process, texts sent between Andreessen and Zuckerberg have been made public and  that caused some speculations about the inner plans of the social network's top management. According to copies of the texts seen by The Guardian, Andreessen texted Zuckerberg in March that the "biggest issue" was "how to define the government service thing without freaking out shareholders that you are losing commitment."

Marc Andreessen is also the Netscape co-founder turned Silicon Valley investor who runs the venture-capital fund Andreessen Horowitz. In simpler terms, he was accused of a conflict of interest, saying he communicated with Zuckerberg repeatedly while serving on the committee that was supposed to be making an independent decision about the stock, according to Yahoo! Finance.

Allegedly, Zuckerbeg wants to work in government without withdrawing his control to Facebook. Due to this, the plaintiffs are accusing Zuckerberg of a "self-interested agglomeration of power," The Financial Times reported.

Erskine Bowles who is a former White House chief of staff and one of Facebook board members on the special committee, was "worried that one of the concessions Zuckerberg wanted - to allow the billionaire to serve two years in government without losing control of Facebook - would look particularly irresponsible," the documents reportedly said.

As CEO, Mark Zuckerberg still currently holds a majority share of voting Facebook stock, giving him control of the company. But he wanted to be able to sell this off to fund his new philanthropy efforts - the "Chan-Zuckerberg Initiative" - without losing this control.

With this in mind, Zuckerberg proposed a new class of shares, and three board members were placed on a special committee to represent shareholders in the discussions wherein one of them is Andreessen. A Facebook spokesperson told Bloomberg that "Facebook is confident that the special committee engaged in a thorough and fair process to negotiate a proposal in the best interests of Facebook and its shareholders."

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