Zynga Founder's Power Play

Zynga founder Mark Pincus says his company will be a “meritocracy,” but he obviously thinks he has quite a bit more merit than anyone else—70 times as much, to be exact. As the game company prepares to go public, Pincus has granted himself a special class of shares that give him 70 votes each, while all other corporate insiders get only seven votes per share, and regular investors get merely one. “In other words, Zynga, producer of such wildly popular online games as FarmVille and Words With Friends, is happy to take your money as it moves ahead with an IPO expected to raise about $1 billion from the public. It’s just not interested in giving you much of a say over how it runs what ostensibly will be a publicly owned company,” writes Gary Rivlin.