[jm4]

That has far reaching unintended consequences. Thousands of people out of jobs, investors out of money, etc. We’re not just talking fat cat shareholders. There are institutional investors, pension plans, 401k’s. Killing a company like Meta has a financial impact on virtually everyone in the country when the people we’re actually trying to punish are the slimeball CEO and his inner circle of executives.

Our system can’t bear something like a corporate death penalty. Maybe that’s another problem in and of itself. You won’t ever catch me advocating for a company like Meta - they are among the worst - but the solution can’t be one with the potential to kick off a 2008-style financial crisis. The cure can't be as painful as the disease.

[IAmBroom]

A true acolyte of the Church of Too Big To Fail speaks up...

[jm4]

That's not fair at all. I am not saying anything about too big to fail. My whole point is that most of the people who get punished by a corporate death penalty don't deserve it. And if you want to go around imposing that penalty then some things need to be structurally different to avoid all the collateral damage.

By all means, punish Zuckerberg and the executives who built the monster. Civil forfeiture is ok with me. Take their money, punish them, charge them with crimes if they broke the law. I don't care. I'm not going to advocate for them escaping accountability just because they are big. Force them to change their business model. Let them fail if they can't find a way to succeed legitimately. But understand that there's a difference between letting a business fail and killing it overnight.

[robin_reala]

Meta’s negative qualities have been obvious for a decade or more at this point. If you’ve joined them as an employee or invested in them then you knew what you were getting into.

[ben_w]

> but the solution can’t be one with the potential to kick off a 2008-style financial crisis.

I don't think it would cause that much damage. If I understand right about floats and stuff, Meta is 2.13% of the S&P500, so NVIDIA (8%) could sneeze and cause more fallout to pension plans and so on than deleting Meta entirely. A sudden worldwide loss of access to content on Meta's servers would cause more secondary fallout than what happens to the markets.

But if forcibly dis-incorporating Meta did cause such market fallout, there's always this: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Slave_Compensation_Act_1837

[cyanydeez]

far greater consequences to let business become the defacto unelected government.

[suttontom]

I don't think the poster meant applying the death penalty to the corporation.