Bezos Divorce Won't Be Weird for Amazon

This post originally appeared in Money Stuff.

One nice thing about Jeff Bezos is that he is just a regular shareholder of Amazon.com Inc. He’s a big shareholder—he owns about 16.1 percent of the stock, more than twice as much as the next-biggest holder—but he just owns ordinary common stock, with no special voting rights or agreements, and he has nowhere close to a majority. To the extent that he controls Amazon, it is because (1) he is the chief executive officer and (2) he is good at it. If a majority of the board of directors wanted to fire him, or if a disgruntled majority of the shareholders wanted to install a new board and management, they could, but this is not something that ever really comes up. Bezos’s situation is very different from that of Mark Zuckerberg, for instance; people do sometimes go around saying that Zuckerberg should not be CEO of Facebook Inc. anymore, but the only person who can do anything about that is Zuckerberg himself, since he is Facebook’s controlling shareholder by virtue of holding super-voting stock.