Meta, the owner of Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, is considering changing where it has been recorded from Delaware to another state, said two people with knowledge of the business.
The company looks at Texas and a handful of other states, said that the people who were not authorized to talk about the confidential discussions. The process is at an early stage and no decision was made, they added, and Meta's head office would stay in Menlo Park, Calif.
Meta has undergone a company overseeing under Mark Zuckerberg, founder and chief executive of the company. Mr. Zuckerberg has made cuts over the past two years, so that the company will work faster and efficiently. More recently, he has aggressively praised President Trump and policy makers in Washington, because they have established an agenda for issues such as Antitrust and Artificial Intelligence, which will influence the greatest technology companies.
A Meta spokesperson refused to comment on a potential reintegration. The Wall Street Journal previously reported that the company could leave Delaware and be included in Texas or elsewhere.
Since the meta was founded as Facebook in 2004, it has been included in Delaware. Many shareholders lawsuits are submitted in the courts of Delaware, and Meta is confronted with lawsuits there from a number of cases, including one of a scandal about usersprivacy in which the electoral profiling agency Cambridge Analytica was involved in 2018.
Integration of a different state that may be more favorable for companies instead of claimants in Class Action rights, could help Meta in future shareholders' cases, the people said.
Last year the private rocket company of Elon Musk, SpaceX, switched its foundation to Texas from Delaware. Mr. Musk made the move weeks after a Delaware judge invalidated his wage package at Tesla, the maker of electric vehicles he leads.
That case was submitted by Tesla shareholders who challenge a share option package with which Mr. Musk could acquire around 304 million Tesla shares at a pre -set price if the company had achieved certain goals. The judge ruled that Mr. Musk had effectively supervised his own compensation plan, at that time appreciated by more than $ 50 billion, with the help of conforming board members.
“You could read this as a bet that because Musk Tesla and some of his other companies moved to Texas, the customer effects will be that it will develop a case law that is friendly to controllers,” said Eric Talley, a business law and Governance Professor At Columbia Law School.
In recent years, the Cancery Rechtbank of Delaware has also issued judgments in other matters that have updated the earlier case law in the State and has sent reverb through legal circles on long -established corporate governance practices. Some of those statements have enabled shareholders and subordinated industrial councils of directors.
Meta has a dual-class share structure that effectively gives Mr Zuckerberg full control over the company and the board of directors, something that can be challenged by the recent statements in Delaware.
Integration in Texas is easier for established companies such as Meta and Tesla, Mr Talley said. A younger company still seems more legitimate and more reliable for shareholders, if it is included in Delaware because the state has stricter legal requirements for operating, he said.
“The hope that Musk and Zuckerberg have is that the courts in Texas will be much tolerant that they do what they want, even if it means a conflict of interest,” Talley said. “There is a much longer belt in Texas.”
