Comment by cube00
6 hours ago
It's next level for a family owned company act like they have stock holders to please by cutting corners rather then doing the right thing.
6 hours ago
It's next level for a family owned company act like they have stock holders to please by cutting corners rather then doing the right thing.
> family owned company act like they have stock holders
A family owned company does have shareholders. The shareholders are the people who own the company.
There’s nothing all that special about a family owned business in this regard, even though they want you to believe it’s completely different. Family owned is a loose term anyway. Large companies are large companies.
Companies can prioritize things other that money if the shareholders all agree. The more shareholders a company has, the harder it is for them all to agree on anything aside from "we want more money". Family-owned business often (but not always) have a small number of shareholders, so it's easier for them to have shared values.
For example, my brother and I co-own a smallish (~$5 million/year revenue) software business. We do care about money to some extent, but we regularly agree to do things that work against shareholder value because we also care about things other than money. With two people, it's easy for our values to be aligned on those other things.
With dozens or more shareholders, that's basically impossible. A publicly traded company couldn't realistically be like "hey shareholders, can we agree that we care a lot about this niche local political issue in the town the company was founded?" The more shareholders you have, the more the only commonality between them is "we want more money".
There are many family-owned businesses that are only in it for the money, but "family-owned" can be a proxy for "not very many shareholders" which at least opens the door for the company to have non-financial priorities.
The existence of "socially conscious" investment funds says that there are investors out there who do value things other than total return. It is a myth that "shareholder value" must only be defined in terms of money. Brand reputation, goodwill, etc. can all be considered. It just happens that money is the overriding concern most of the time.
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if anything they are even more tight fisted because every penny is theirs.
publicly traded/vc funded companies have always paid me the most because the money isn’t really theirs.
Every family-owned company I've worked for has been owned by a greedy family.
Family or not, when these are the executives you hire for over a decade it shouldn't surprise anyone that events like this occur: https://www.ksbw.com/article/taylor-farms-tennessee-ex-presi...
>Brian Thure served as president of Taylor Farms Tennessee from about 2012 until March 2026 and allegedly used his authority over finances, payroll, vendors and accounting to divert company money for personal benefit. >Taylor Farms claims the alleged fraud came to light during an IRS audit
It’s a multi billion dollar corporation. It’s not a mom and pop 10 acre farm. Family owned means nothing at that point.
Right. By those stretches, the Sinaloa Cartel and Saudi Aramco could advertise as "family owned"
95% of farms are "family owned". Large scale family owned farms make up about 4% of all farms but 48% of agricultural output. https://www.nass.usda.gov/Publications/Highlights/2025/Censu...
There's a tendency to want to be nice to farmers who own "family owned farms" because it evokes imagery steeped in quaint classical Americana. It is mostly from misinformation that this impression arises. Don't feel bad for a family owned farm that isn't going well. They get special bankruptcy rules, they can sell off their very valuable land as a backstop, and most of all they are probably not as small and quaint and cute as you think they are.
Mary Antoinette should've tried that line "It's not a monarchy, just a family-owned state"
stockholders? no. stakeholders? absolutely.
The WalMart Waltons are a "family"
At the core, "Family-owned" just means nepotism is preferred over merit.
(The mob is also "Family-owned")
SpaceX is more “family owned” than Walmart.
That doesn't seem at odds with what they said. The Waltons are a family, which illustrates the point of what a fully "family-owned" business might look like compared to one with external shareholders pretty directly. I don't think it's that hard to understand that giving the Walton's 100% of the stock seems unlikely to address any concerns people have with Walmart, which is evidence of their point that maybe "family-owned" is a red herring.