The AI Lab Control Tracker: Equity vs. Voting Power at OpenAI, Anthropic, Meta, Google and xAI

Control at the five companies building frontier AI does not follow the money. Larry Page and Sergey Brin together cast 52.7 percent of the votes at Alphabet, Google's parent, on about 11 percent of its voting-class shares 1. Elon Musk holds roughly 85.1 percent of the voting power at SpaceX, which has owned xAI outright since February 2, 2026 2. And by September 2027, a majority of Anthropic's board will be elected by a trust built to hold no financial stake in the company 3.

This tracker measures that gap, holder by holder. Every figure links to its document: a charter, an SEC filing, or a company's own governance page where one exists, and a named, dated report where control figures are only published that way. The metric is the control premium, a holder's share of the votes divided by that holder's share of the equity. At par it equals one. Across these five companies it runs from about two up to values no ratio can express.

Inside Alphabet's 4.7-to-one control premium

Alphabet's 2026 proxy prints the raw material: Class A common stock carries one vote, Class B carries ten, Class C carries none, and the classes vote together as one 1. Larry Page beneficially owns 389,051,160 Class B shares, worth 27.4 percent of total voting power. His economic footprint, those shares against the 6,659,444,154 Class A and B shares outstanding at the April 6, 2026 record date, works out to 5.8 percent. Divide 27.4 by 5.8 and each unit of Page's ownership carries about 4.7 votes. Sergey Brin lands in the same place, 25.3 percent of votes on 5.4 percent of shares 1. The lock runs deeper than the founders: Alphabet's executives and directors as a group hold 92.2 percent of Class B, worth 54.3 percent of total voting power. For scale, BlackRock's 356,934,964 Class A shares make it one of Alphabet's largest owners at 6.1 percent of that class, worth 2.5 percent of the votes; Page owns about 9 percent more shares than BlackRock and wields roughly eleven times its voting power 1.

Meta runs the same math at a near-identical multiplier, about 4.5. Mark Zuckerberg holds 60.8 percent of Meta's total voting power on 99.8 percent of its ten-vote Class B stock (639,347 Class A and 341,823,978 Class B shares beneficial as of April 1, 2026), per the company's 2026 proxy 4. His economics, 13.5 percent computed from the proxy's own outstanding counts (2,196,045,588 Class A and 342,377,716 Class B), put the control premium at about 4.5: 60.8 over 13.5 4. Morningstar's analysis of the May 2024 shareholder meeting had him at 61 percent, holding 99.7 percent of the ten-vote Class B stock, a meeting-vote basis rather than outstanding shares 5. The lock holds because Class B converts to one-vote Class A on sale or transfer, with limited exceptions for estate planning and charitable donations 6.

Musk is the founder outlier because his money is real: an estimated 42 percent of SpaceX's equity against roughly 85.1 percent of its votes, a premium of about two 72. The SpaceX S-1, which defines the xAI parent as X.AI Holdings LLC, is what puts xAI's ownership on the public record at all 8.

At OpenAI and Anthropic, control rides on rights, not share counts

OpenAI completed its restructuring on October 28, 2025: the for-profit OpenAI Group PBC is controlled by the nonprofit OpenAI Foundation, which holds conventional equity in the group 9. Reported figures put the Foundation at 26 percent of the company, a share NBC values at about 130 billion dollars, and Microsoft at 27 percent, against OpenAI's reported 500 billion dollar valuation in early October 9. Microsoft's stake carries no control rights beyond ordinary shares, as reported, and Microsoft and other investors do not have seats on OpenAI's boards 9. The Foundation's premium cannot be computed from public numbers, because its control is stated as a right, not a percentage.

Anthropic, a Delaware Public Benefit Corporation chartered around "the responsible development and maintenance of advanced AI for the long-term benefit of humanity" 3, went further. It created Class T stock, held exclusively by the Long-Term Benefit Trust, which elects and removes a share of the board that phases in on time and funding milestones and reaches a majority within four years, meaning by September 2027; Series C and later investors elect one seat 3. Trustees are designed to be financially disinterested, and the roster named on the issuer page is Neil Buddy Shah (chair), Richard Fontaine, Mariano-Florentino Cuellar, and Ben Bernanke 3. The board has seven members and the trust holds authority over appointing most of them through non-economic shares 10. Chief Executive Dario Amodei owns about 2 percent of the company, and a report from The Information says Anthropic is evaluating super-voting stock for him and his co-founders ahead of an IPO it confidentially filed for in June, one week before OpenAI filed its own, after a 65 billion dollar May financing round at a 965 billion dollar valuation 10. If that structure ships, Anthropic becomes the one company on this tracker stacking both control regimes: founder votes amplified beyond a 2 percent stake, and a board majority held by a trust with no stake at all. Public buyers would supply the capital and sit outside both layers.

How control actually moved, 2023 to 2027

• September 19, 2023: Anthropic publishes the Long-Term Benefit Trust structure: Class T stock, phased board seats, majority within four years 3.
• March 28, 2025: xAI acquires X Holdings 2.
• October 28, 2025: OpenAI's restructuring completes; the OpenAI Foundation controls OpenAI Group PBC and takes conventional equity 9.
• January 2026: xAI closes a 20 billion dollar Series E, upsized from a 15 billion dollar target 2.
• February 2, 2026: SpaceX completes the xAI merger; xAI becomes a wholly owned subsidiary at reported valuations of 1 trillion dollars for SpaceX and 250 billion for xAI, with xAI shares exchanged at 0.1433 SpaceX shares apiece 2.
• April 16, 2026: Meta Platforms files its proxy statement, the document of record for the Zuckerberg Class B lock 4.
• April 24, 2026: Alphabet files its proxy statement, printing the founders' 27.4 and 25.3 percent voting-power figures 1.
• May 2026: Anthropic raises 65 billion dollars at a 965 billion dollar valuation 10.
• June 2026: Anthropic confidentially files an IPO prospectus; OpenAI files its own a week later 10.
• Mid-2026: SpaceX goes public; the post-IPO count puts Musk at approximately 42 percent of equity with more than 80 percent of voting power 7.
• August 18, 2026: the super-voting report lands; Anthropic intends to keep the trust 10.

The tracker updates whenever one of these documents moves: a charter amendment, the spring proxy filings, or a registration statement going public. The next hard data point is Anthropic's public prospectus, which will force the company's first full cap-table disclosure and, with it, the first clean market answer to what a frontier lab's votes actually cost 10.