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Elon Musk, dual-class shares, and who owns the future



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Welcome to The TechCrunch Exchange, a weekly startups-and-markets newsletter. It’s inspired by the daily TechCrunch+ column where it gets its name. Want it in your inbox every Saturday? Sign up here. 
Technology news was entertaining this week, if nothing else. The fact that we started the week learning that Elon Musk had bought a material percentage of Twitter’s stock, spent the mid-week period learning that he had joined the board, and by the end of Friday were busy reading about how employees were digesting the matter, it’s been busy.
But better busy than not, and the saga has given us a lot to think about. I want to touch on the matter one more time today through the lens of voting rights.
Something that we have seen the last few years are multi-class shares at startups. In simple terms, multi-class shares exist when investors and founders create a class of equity that affords them more votes per unit of stock than what is provided by other, lesser types of company stock. This does a few things, including concentrating powe …

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