Wait, what? How in the fuck is it legal for the FTC to accept such a deal? They're not a profit-generating organization. They're an accountability organization. I get that this is a civil complaint, but very little in the news could make me happier than to think of Zuckerberg and Sandberg leaning into their work in the prison commissary.
Matt Stoller with the hottest of hot takes And the timing is very suspicious. While Zuckerberg had pledged to only sell $1 billion of stock a year in 2015, after he “learned of Cambridge Analytica’s massive extraction of Facebook user data, he and the entities controlled by him significantly accelerated his sales of Facebook shares,” selling roughly $10 billion of stock while he had material non-public information about the firm. Sandberg did the same thing, as did WhatsApp founder Jan Koum, and a host of others. (One irony here is that this was a losing trade, because Facebook’s stock is higher today than it was then, and no doubt this will be part of their defense. It’s also an irrelevant fact, since trading on non-public information is the offense.)It’s a very long complaint, but the gist is pretty simple. The first part is that Zuckerberg knew he was violating the law, and in particular the Federal Trade Commission order barring Facebook from deceiving users. And he did it anyway, with the permission of board members like Zients and auditors like PwC. The second part, and this is where it gets interesting, is that when he realized his lawbreaking would be exposed via reporting on Cambridge Analytica, he sold huge blocs of stock.
Sure, maybe laws were broken (and require a radical re-writing), but the plaintiffs probably don't have enough money to retain good representation long enough to keep the case moving past the defendants' imminent legal stalling. Freedom, bebe. And that's how to pronounce your username, in case anyone was wondering.
The plaintiffs have a lot of money. These are apparently giant pension funds, so they probably have hundreds of billions. What they're willing to settle at is a different matter, but hopefully their discovery will be noticed by criminal authorities. Remember folks, Martha Stewart spent like 6 months in jail for insider trading on like $50k, or approximately 0.0005% of what Zuck insider traded.
Yeah, the pension funds together have something on the order of $10 billion, but now I understand why that's irrelevant. It's times like these that I wished I had more capacity to signal boost the discovery info to increase the likelihood of criminal prosecution. Since this is a violation of federal law, does it have to be pursued by a federal or state-level prosecutor, or could I hire someone in the private sector to go after Zuck, F-book, and/or the FTC (if I had the money: I don't)? Sorry for my confusion, it's a mix of me being in a hurry earlier, generally ignorant of finance law, and unable to effectively google without legalese jargon know-how. And not wanting to spend hours poring over the law code. Definitely that last one.