Mark Zuckerberg owns 13% of Meta but controls 61% of its votes. California’s wealth tax would bill him on the 13%

California voters will decide on Nov. 3 whether the state’s billionaires should pay a one-time 5% tax on their net worth. Some of them have already left, like Peter Thiel and Google cofounders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. They join seven billionaires so far who have publicly moved out of the state, taking about $540 billion, or 30% of the state’s billionaire wealth. Meanwhile, others like Jensen Huang are staying.

Meta’s Mark Zuckerberg looked, up until now, as if he would also join Huang in staying in the state where his company is headquartered. But Meta’s new SEC filing that posted this week shows that’s in part because of the key difference between owning a company and controlling it.

What he owns and what he controls

Ownership is a share of a company’s value. Control is a share of its votes. For most shareholders they are the same because each share carries one vote. At Meta, they are not.

Zuckerberg holds mostly Class B shares, which carry 10 votes each. Ordinary Class A shares carry one. So of every $100 of Meta’s value, about $13 is his, but of every 100 votes, about 61 are his, according to a filing Meta released Wednesday. That majority lets him elect the entire board and decide nearly every shareholder vote.

A wealth tax bills the first number—and to pay it, Zuckerberg would have to sell stock, thereby losing control. When Class B shares are sold, they turn into one-vote Class A shares, so every sale to pay the tax would cut into his control.

According to the filing, Meta’s board feared that loss of........

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