The Ford family owns roughly 2% of Ford Motor Company's outstanding shares. They also control 40% of every vote cast at Ford's annual meeting. That's not a loophole - it's a separate class of stock, and it exists at some of the most familiar names in the market: Alphabet, Meta, Berkshire Hathaway, Snap. If you've ever wondered why Google trades under two different tickers, or why a single share of Berkshire costs more than a house while another share of the same company costs a few hundred dollars, the answer is dual-class stock.
What "dual-class" actually means
Most companies issue one class of common stock: one share, one vote, one claim on the company's earnings, proportional to everyone else's. Dual-class (or multi-class) structures break that link. A company issues two or more classes of stock that usually carry the same economic rights - the same claim on profits, the same treatment in a buyout - but different voting rights, or in some cases are held by entirely different sets of people.
There's no SEC-standard definition of what "Class A" or "Class B" means. Each company defines it in its own charter, which is exactly why the same two letters mean different things at different companies. The only way to know what a specific class actually gets you is to check that company's filings - not to assume based on another company's structure.
Five real structures, five different answers
| Company | Public class(es) | Votes/share | Who holds the super-voting class |
|---|---|---|---|
| Alphabet | GOOGL (Class A), GOOG (Class C) | A: 1 vote · C: 0 votes | Class B (10 votes/share, unlisted) - Larry Page & Sergey Brin |
| Meta Platforms | META (Class A) | 1 vote | Class B (10 votes/share, unlisted) - ~99.7% held by Mark Zuckerberg |
| Berkshire Hathaway | BRK.A, BRK.B | A: full vote · B: 1/10,000th of A's vote | Not founder-control-driven; B exists for affordability |
| Ford Motor | F (common stock) | 1 vote | Class B (unlisted, Ford-family-only) carries a fixed 40% of total voting power |
| Snap Inc. | SNAP (Class A) | 0 votes | Class C (10 votes/share, founders Evan Spiegel & Bobby Murphy only) |
Two things stand out. First, the "public" class isn't always the powerless one economically - it usually has identical or near-identical economic rights to the super-voting class. It's the votes that are unequal, not (typically) the dividends or the liquidation claim. Second, the gap between economic ownership and voting control can get large. Snap's founders control roughly 88.5% of the vote through Class C shares outside investors cannot buy at all. Zuckerberg holds about 13% of Meta's economic ownership but 61% of its voting power. Page and Brin's combined Class B stake, per an April 2026 SEC filing, gives them 52.7% of Alphabet's vote. The Ford family's 2% economic stake still commands 40% of the vote, by a formula written into Ford's charter that guarantees Class B a fixed 40% of voting power as long as enough Class B shares remain outstanding.
GOOG vs. GOOGL: the two-ticker trap
Alphabet is the cleanest real-world illustration of why this matters to an ordinary investor, because it trades under two separate, liquid, actively-quoted tickers for the same company. GOOGL is Class A, one vote per share. GOOG is Class C, created in a 2014 stock split specifically so Alphabet could keep issuing shares for acquisitions and employee compensation without diluting the founders' voting control - new Class C shares carry no vote at all, so handing them out never touches Page and Brin's grip on the company.
Economically, GOOG and GOOGL are the same investment: identical claim on Alphabet's earnings, and prices that track each other so closely the gap is normally a rounding error. The only thing you're giving up by holding GOOG instead of GOOGL is a vote you were extremely unlikely to ever exercise (or that would have mattered - see the ownership numbers above). The practical risk isn't which one is "better" - it's mixing them up. A watchlist entry, a screener filter, or a price alert set on the wrong one of the two will occasionally look like it's tracking the wrong price, because the two tickers can drift by a small amount intraday even though they represent the same underlying company.
BRK.A vs. BRK.B: a dual-class split for a different reason
Berkshire Hathaway's two classes look similar on the surface - two tickers, one company - but the motivation was the opposite of a founder trying to keep control. Warren Buffett already controlled Berkshire through his Class A holdings; the risk in 1996 wasn't losing control, it was outside firms launching unit investment trusts that repackaged fractional shares of the (then roughly $30,000-per-share) Class A stock and sold them to retail investors with an added layer of fees. Berkshire's response was to issue its own cheaper class directly: BRK.B carries 1/1,500th of a Class A share's economic interest, but only 1/10,000th of its voting power - a deliberately steeper cut on votes than on economics. A Class A share converts into 1,500 Class B shares whenever the holder wants; the reverse conversion doesn't exist.
The index-fund wrinkle
Multi-class structures used to be a disqualifier for the S&P 500. Starting July 31, 2017, S&P Dow Jones Indices barred any company with more than one share class from being newly added to the S&P 500, MidCap 400, or SmallCap 600 - a direct response to a wave of tech IPOs (Snap chief among them, going public that same year with a class of stock that carried zero votes at all) using dual-class structures to raise public money while keeping full control private. Existing multi-class constituents - Alphabet, Meta, Berkshire among them - were grandfathered in and never removed.
On April 17, 2023, S&P reversed that policy. Multi-class companies are eligible for the S&P Composite 1500 indices again, at the Index Committee's normal discretion, with no minimum public-voting-power threshold required. One quirk that survives either way: Alphabet's GOOGL and GOOG are both listed as separate constituents in the S&P 500 - which is why the index is often described as "500 companies" but actually contains 503 line items. The two rows are sized so Alphabet's combined weight equals what a single-class company of the same market cap would get - it isn't double-counted - but it is double-listed.
Which one should you actually track
For a company like Alphabet, where every class carries the same economic rights, the choice of ticker is mostly a matter of convenience rather than a real investment decision - unless a specific index fund you own is mandated to hold only one class (most aren't), or you actually plan to show up to a shareholder vote (given the numbers above, at Alphabet, Meta, or Snap, your vote alongside public Class A holders has essentially no chance of swinging an outcome anyway). What does matter is consistency: know which exact class you own, and set your price alerts and watchlist entries on that ticker specifically, not on "whichever one shows up first" in a search. GOOG and GOOGL can and do drift apart by small amounts intraday - not because the underlying business changed, but because the two tickers are, technically, two different securities trading in two different order books. An alert built around the wrong one of the two will occasionally fire a little early, a little late, or not at all relative to the shares you're actually holding.
