Subject: Re: $362.87B
What are the chances we ever(10 - 20 years) have one class of shares ?


I don't know the answer to that, and no real basis for speculation beyond a gut feel of "probably not soon, if ever".


But as a related note, I like the way that a few companies have dealt with this issue.
The founders give themselves super-voting shares, but the super-voting power automatically disappears at some predetermined future date or event.
e.g., Alimentation Couche-Tard was set up so that (IIRC) the 10:1 super-voting class converted to common class as soon as the youngest of the still-living founders was age 65+, something like that.

The French tried to find a solution to get power into the hands of the committed shareholders rather than the short termers (brutal Anglo-Saxons no doubt), but managed to get it precisely backwards. Their solution: shareholders who have held their shares for a long time automatically get double voting rights.
This looks good on the surface, until you realize that it's only backwards looking, and serves only to preserve the power of the current old guard.
It should have been set up to give double voting rights to any shares that the owner pledges not to sell for the next five years. An excellent test to weed out control by transient owners.


The other point raised is that it's a shame that even the price of a single A share is now out of the reach of many people who would in fact make good quality long term shareholders.
That would easily be fixed by a small split in the A shares.
A price in the $50-100k range considered sufficient to keep out the short term riffraff a few years back, so a 5:1 or 10:1 split of A shares would not be an unreasonable move.
And, unlike most splits, it would not be for a meaningless reason.
You could even come up with a rule of thumb: do a 2:1 split any time the share price gets higher than three times the cost of the average car.

Jim