Facebook's Voting Stock

Even though Facebook has lots of its shares traded on the stock market, Mark Zuckerberg basically controls the majority of voting rights in the corporation. In other words, he can do pretty much what he wants, and he doesn't need to care about Facebook's falling stock price. According to Matthew Yglesias over at Slate, this may turn out to be a strength and stock-holders may actually see share prices rise back to their IPO price. Zuckerberg doesn't have to worry about the short-term demands of the market, freeing him up to think of the long term. 

Maybe there is something in this. Last week, for example, the markets responded positively to Zuckerberg's first major speech about the company's future since Facebook's flotation back in May.  However, this may only be a temporary bounce. Facebook may have problems keeping its key employees as many of them now have stock options well out of the money and stock which has halved in value (click here).  In addition, Facebook's future growth may rely on entering markets which up until now have been impenetrable (click here for an infographic showing FB's global coverage).