How much power does a CEO have over a public company?
The shareholders elect the board of directors who in turn appoint a CEO. The CEO is responsible for the overall running of the company. To answer your specific questions: Yes, Steve Jobs could make decisions that are harmful to the well-being of the company.  However, it's the responsibility of the board of directors to keep his decisions and behavior in check. They will remove him from his position if they feel he could be a danger to the company. If Steve Jobs [Tim Cook] were to decide to try to kill Apple, does he have the power to do so? Yes. But he would be held accountable. In addition to the other answers, the CEO is a fiduciary of the corporation. That means his/her actions must be in good faith and look out for the well-being of the company. Otherwise, he could be sued and held liable for civil damages and even criminally prosecuted for malfeasance. This is a very good question and is at the core of corporate governance.  The CEO is a very powerful figure indeed. But always remember that he heads the firm's management only. He is appointed by the board of directors and is accountable to them. The board on the other hand is accountable to the firm's shareholders and creditors. The CEO is required to disclose his ownership of the firm as well.  Ideally, you (as a shareholder) would want the board of directors to be as independent of the management as it is possible. U.S. regulations require, among other things, the board of directors to disclose any material relationship they may have with the firm's employees, ex-employees, or their families. Such disclosures can be found in annual filings of a company. If the board of directors acts independently of the management then it acts to protect the shareholder's interests over the firm management's interest and take seemingly hard decisions (like dismissing a CEO) when they become necessary to protect the franchise and shareholder wealth. Also keep note - some companies have a combined CEO/Chairman of the board role. While he/she would not be allowed to negotiate contracts or stock plans, some corporate governance analysts advocate for the separation of the roles to remove any opportunity for the CEO to unduly influence the board.  This could be the case for dysfunctional boards. However, the alternate camps will say that the combined role has no negative effect on shareholder returns.   SEC regulations require companies to disclose negotiations between the board and CEO (as well as other named executives) for contracts, employee stock plans, and related information. Sometimes reading the proxy statement to find out, for example, how many times the board meets a year, how many other boards a director serves on, and if the CEO sits on any other board (usually discouraged to serve on more than 2) will provide some insight into a well-run (or not well-run) board.
"a lot of companies will ""class"" their shares and the founders will hold on to the A class shares so that they can distribute more than 50% but still retain the majority of control over company decisions. A lot of this stuff is set out in the underwriting." CEOs have multiple fiduciary duties, which fall into three broad categories:  care, loyalty, and disclosure.  You are probably referring to the duty of loyalty:  to act, in good faith, in the best interests of shareholders, putting shareholders' interests above the CEOs' own personal interests. Yes and no.  Courts do understand the idea of tyranny of the majority.  Specifically, actions that hurt the company for personal gain is still theft against the minority shareholders.  It's common misconception that this fiduciary duty means that a CEO's job is to raise the price of their stock.  The truth is, stock price is a number that has an extremely tenuous relation to actual company health.  So, it's entirely possible for a shareholder lawsuit to happen.  It's just typically cheaper and less hassle to sell the stocks for a loss and get out while they can. Many CEOs I have heard of earn a lot more than 200k. In fact a lot earn more than 1M and then get bonuses as well. Many wealthy people increase there wealth by investing in property, the stock market, businesses and other assets that will produce them good capital growth. Oh yeh, and luck usually has very little to do with their success. Yes. I can by all means start my own company and name myself CEO. If Bill Gates wanted to hire me, I'll take the offer and still be CEO of my own company. Now, whether or not my company makes money and survives is another question.  This is the basis of self-employed individuals who contract out their services. At any given time there are buy orders and there are sell orders.  Typically there is a little bit of space between the lowest sell order and the highest buy order, this is known as the bid/ask spread.  As an example say person A will sell for $10.10 but person B will only buy at $10.00.  If you have a billion shares outstanding just the space between the bid and ask prices represents $100,000,000 of market cap. Now imagine that the CEO is in the news related to some embezzlement investigation.  A number of buyers cancel their orders.  Now the highest buy order is $7.  There isn't money involved, that's just the highest offer to buy at the time; but that's a drop from $10 to $7.  That's a change in market cap of $3,000,000,000.  Some seller thinks the stock will continue to fall, and some buyer thinks the stock has reached a fair enterprise value at $7 billion ($7 per share).  Whether or not the seller lost money depends on where the seller bought the stock.  Maybe they bought when it was an IPO for $1.  Even at $7 they made $6 per share. Value is changing, not money.  Though it would be fun, there's no money bonfire at the NYSE. OTOH if you look at automobile purchases I don't know if anyone could tell you who the CEO of say, GM or Toyota or BMW is. Those purchases tend to be more emotional than anything else and not directly related to corporate or CEO behavior. If you don't have any voting rights then you don't have much say in the direction of the company.  Of course, if the majority of voting rights are held by 1 or 2 people/institutions then you probably don't have much say regardless. That said, 0.1% isn't a whole lot of a voice anyway. http://www.catalyst.org/publication/271/women-ceos-of-the-fortune-1000  There are only 40 women CEO's out of the top 1000 companies.  Looks like Virginia Rometty is viewed as a star at IBM.   And you have Ursula Burns of Xerox.    (Those are considered tech right?)  Ursula Burns is kind of completely amazing actually.  But there aren't a lot of high profile female CEO's because there aren't a lot of female CEO's period.    You can look over the list for the tech ones.    Also high profile is usually linked with something sexy and interesting to the public.   I don't know many male CEOs.  Apple, Amazon.  That's about it.   I don't even know who's in charge of google. The person holding the majority of shares can influence the decisions of the company. Even though the shareholder holds majority of the shares,the Board of Directors appointed by the shareholders in the Annual General Meeting will run the company. As said in the characteristics of the company,the owners and the administrators of the company are different. The shareholder holding majority of the shares can influence the business decisions like appointing the auditor,director etc. and any other business decisions(not taken in the ordinary business) that are taken in the Annual General Meeting. Bullshit, I'm guessing you don't know many CEOs and what they provide for a company, do you?   Also, your idea about private management is meaningless. The shareholders manage the company. End of story. They are also the owners. Warren Buffet also isn't the CEO of a major company - or at least one that matters in this context. He is the CEO of Berkshire Hathaway. That is a holding company that owns a handful of other companies.  It doesn't have customers, it doesn't sell a product. It owns companies that do those things, some of which directly rely on technology and need their CEO to have a strong understanding of technology.  The things is though, that each of those companies? They have their own CEO - not Warren Buffett. "Trump called it ""controls"" rather than owns.  He is firmly remaining as the CEO and is the largest shareholder so that's a moot point.  That is still $85 billion in shares.  If Trump wipes off only 10% in stock price with his constant threats of taxes and breaking up a monopoly, that would cost Bezos $8.5 billion.  If Trump does break up Amazon then Bezos may lose much more.  Trump explained to Fox News, ""This is owned as a toy by Jeff Bezos who controls Amazon. Amazon is getting away with murder tax-wise. He's using the Washington Post for power so that the politicians in Washington don't tax Amazon like they should be taxed,"" Trump said. Trump added that he read somewhere that Bezos was worried Trump would go after him for anti-trust violations." "I hate to point this out, but have you heard of this guy Trump, or Warren Buffet (although his son seems to be very competent and grounded, to some degree).   The US is also plagued with this problem where family companies remain so through leadership, they also tend to fail at greater rates than our publicly ran companies.  I suppose Samsung is public company, but why having stock on the open KRX doesn’t lead to better leadership is beyond me to understand?  EDIT:My bad for bringing Trump into this, it was meant as an example of wealth distribution which translates into capacity for business options, and he's well known. However you guys need to do some more research before throwing shade, Howard Buffet has taken over Berkshire Hathaway in a non-executive role, while also holding board positions on a multitude of companies in which BH own significant portions including coca-cola. I wasn't pointing out Warren is incompetent in any way, just he passed the reins off to family too in many ways. ""In December 2011, Warren Buffett told CBS News that he would like his son Howard to succeed him as Berkshire Hathaway's non-executive chairman.""  Apologies for lack of clarity in my statement." &gt; Board members that have fiduciary responsibilities to investors (this includes the potential for personal liability).  How often do lawsuits surrounding this even happen? How can shareholders prove in court that the CEO or whomever they are suing wasn't acting in the best interest of the company and actually have a meaningful case? There are countless badly run public companies out there and they don't get sued.