Most public company shareholder meetings are terribly boring.
The Seven Weirdest Things From Facebook’s Shareholder Meeting
Stranger than fiction.
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Unless, that is, you’re a high-profile consumer tech company.
Especially Facebook, which held its second annual shareholder meeting in Redwood City, Calif., on Thursday. It’s that special time of year when the company invites anyone who owns at least a single share of Facebook stock to quiz or holler at CEO Mark Zuckerberg himself.
Since Facebook is a far more consumer-oriented company than, say, Cisco, all sorts of colorful attendees come out of the woodwork. Like last summer, this year’s meeting did not disappoint.
Here’s a list of some of the various and sundry goings on from Thursday’s meeting:
- A nun stood up and proceeded to slam Facebook at great length for not properly disclosing its lobbying practices, just one of the stockholder proposals being voted upon during the meeting. “Thank you, Sister,” a Facebook representative responded.
- One man had an envelope for Sheryl Sandberg, the contents of which he did not disclose.
- One man recommended that Facebook form a committee to “boycott Israel,” a suggestion met with boos from the 300 or so people in the audience.
- One woman asked Facebook to do a better job of curbing childhood obesity.
- The Reverend Jesse Jackson showed up. Granted, it was for a noble cause — advocating for hiring more minorities at technology companies, especially into board seats. (Notably, Jackson showed up for Facebook’s shareholder meeting today and Google’s last week, though not Twitter’s shareholder meeting on Wednesday. #lowpriority?)
- One man’s question: Since Facebook’s voting share classes are structured so that Mark Zuckerberg maintains majority control of the company, why were any of the people there to vote in the first place? Facebook’s response, in a nutshell: ¯\_(ツ)_/¯
- After the meeting ended, I witnessed a woman ask a member of Facebook’s public relations team to “improve her cell reception at her house so that she can use Facebook on her phone better.” The PR team member politely responded: “I’ll look into that.”
This article originally appeared on Recode.net.
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