Mark Zuckerberg May Soon Be Fired As Facebook Chairman, As Shareholders Doubt His Leadership

Mark Zuckerberg thought his year couldn't get any worse, after the whole Cambridge Analytica scandal and then a major hack decimated public trust. He thought wrong.

It appears now he's also lost investor faith, as they look to oust him from Facebook's board.

Images courtesy: Reuters

On Wednesday, a group of Facebook's largest investors issued a statement backing a move to remove the founder from his position as chairman of the board. Apparently, between the innumerable scandals, stock price drops, and general collection of bad ideas, they've had just about enough of Zuckerberg and his robot-faced apologies.

The signees on the statement want investors to vote on removing Zuckerberg and replacing him with an independent chairman. To prove the idea works, they've pointed at the 59 percent of companies on the S&P 1500 Index with different people filling CEO and chairman roles. They think this is exactly what Facebook needs, given the "number of severe controversies it's found itself embroiled recently.

Heck, they were annoyed enough to provide a list. These include:

- Russia "meddling in U.S. elections" on Facebook

- The "sharing personal data of 87 million users" that later found its way to Cambridge Analytica

- "Data-sharing with device manufacturers, including Huawei," which U.S. intelligence has identified (with little public evidence) as a threat to national security

- The proliferation of "fake news" on its platform

- The propagation of posts on its platform that fueled violence in Myanmar, India, and South Sudan

- "Depression and other mental health issues, including stress and addiction," that may result from using Facebook

- "Allowing advertisers to exclude black, Hispanic, and other 'ethnic affinities' from seeing ads"

Of course, they missed the news of Facebook allegedly inflating video metrics (to deceive advertisers) by a few hours, or that could have been another entry.

This is just a proposal at the end of the day, and it's up to investors to actually initiate this kind of vote. However, that would still make no difference. As explained by Gizmodo, because of the company's structure, Zuckerberg's vote counts ten times more than shareholders. On top of that, he also controls 60 percent of voting shares in the company.

Basically, no one can oust Zuckerberg, not without criminal accusations perhaps. It's possible he'll maybe step down if faced with major discontent among shareholders, but it's not likely.

Maybe instead he'll just decide to launch a new set of stickers for Messenger and call it even.