“Shareholders are stupid and impertinent — stupid because they give their money to somebody else without any effective control over what this person is doing with it, and impertinent because they ask for a dividend as a reward for their stupidity.”
So said the banker Carl Fürstenberg, who ran the Berliner Handels-Gesellschaft in the late 19th and early 20th century. His disdainful attitude to shareholders appears to live on today with many high-tech entrepreneurs, including the founders of Snap, the Californian company that runs the popular mobile messaging app Snapchat.
Snap’s initial public offering will be the first in the US to issue shares with no voting rights at all. Co-founders Evan Spiegel, chief executive, and Bobby Murphy, chief technology officer, have been transparent about their intentions, stating clearly in the prospectus that it has no intention of paying cash dividends for the foreseeable future.