The Age of Founder Control
Your support keeps us publishing. Follow this link to subscribe to our print magazine.
The Age of Founder Control<br>ByDavid Kampmann<br>Tech billionaires increasingly control our digital spaces, infrastructure, and society. How can we fight surveillance capitalism?
An unofficially-installed poster critical of Elon Musk's wealth is displayed on a bus shelter on June 11, 2026 in Tottenham, England. (Credit: Leon Neal via Getty Images.)<br>Subscribe to Tribune today and help us build a real, socialist alternative to Britain’s media moguls.
Join our mailing list<br>Submit<br>{{ message }}
Thanks for signing up!
Last month, SpaceX went for the largest stock market listing in history worth $1.77 trillion. Taken together with his shares in Tesla, Musk’s equity stake of around 42 percent in SpaceX made him the first trillionaire. Venture capitalists like Peter Thiel who invested early in SpaceX are set to make a killing when they are allowed to sell their shares over the next few months.<br>But beyond the obscene concentration of capitalist wealth in the hands of Silicon Valley’s tech billionaires, SpaceX’s IPO highlights another alarming trend that is often overlooked: the rapid rise of founder-controlled tech monopolies.<br>Even though SpaceX’s shares are now traded on the stock exchange, Musk remains in full control of the company. This is because he holds a special class of supervoting shares giving him 82.4 percent of voting rights. Most shareholders have shares with one vote; Musk’s have ten. SpaceX — a company dominating rocket launches and owning satellites, the X social media platform, the Grok chatbot, and vast AI infrastructure — is listed with a man at the top who cannot be removed by any shareholder vote.<br>Founder control is not about Musk alone. The same pattern holds for Mark Zuckerberg at Meta/Facebook and Larry Page & Sergey Brin at Alphabet/Google. We are witnessing an unprecedented concentration of corporate control in the hands of tech billionaires in charge of AI as well as vast spheres of social media, internet search, data centers, and now space infrastructure.<br>But how did we end up here? Since the early 20th century, Wall Street and US political elites have pushed the liberal ideology of shareholder democracy: the principle that stock ownership confers voice. Everyone should invest their savings in the stock market, so everyone benefits. And every shareholder has a say in how companies are run. Or so the story goes. Alas, this story has always been a myth. Most people on the planet never had the means to invest in shares. And those who did — primarily Western middle classes — never had a real say in how their pension funds invested. Nor did these institutional investors have power over large multinational corporations. Powerful CEOs and billionaire shareholders did. The massive expansion of venture capital since dot-com supercharged this trend and led to the concentration of corporate control in the hands of tech billionaires.<br>Founder control is not an accidental outcome of finance. It is also not the product of Silicon Valley’s increasingly techno-authoritarian ideology. Instead, it is the consequence of fierce competition among venture capitalists seeking to maximise returns. After the dotcom crash, a new generation of insurgent venture capitalists broke into the Silicon Valley establishment by offering supervoting rights which enabled founders to keep control even after the IPO.<br>When Musk was still building SpaceX from scratch, his early backers — Thiel’s Founders Fund, the PayPal Mafia network, and eventually venture capital firm Andreessen Horowitz — made a calculated bet: offer founders like Musk permanent control and win the deal. It worked. They won the deals and made billions.<br>Most people assume that the IPO process addresses this power balance. (In other words, that banks, regulators, and institutional investors impose accountability on founders in exchange for access to public capital markets.) This assumption is wrong. Take SpaceX again. By the time Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley entered the picture, it was too late already. The banks were competing ferociously to underwrite the most lucrative deal in stock market history. They did not challenge Musk’s 82 percent voting control. They accommodated it. And they tried to sell it at an obscene price to almost every pension fund and retail investor on the planet.<br>This has been the case across every major tech IPO of the past two decades. Meta, Alphabet, Airbnb, Palantir, and now SpaceX: the same structure, the same result. Insiders — founders and their early venture capital backers — make fortunes selling into an overpriced public market and keep control of tech monopolies. Ordinary savers, through their pension funds, ISAs, and index trackers, provide the capital that generates those fortunes. In exchange, they receive shares with no meaningful voting rights and have no say in how their money is used. This helps to...