The common justification for this is that for a media company (NYT) you want a person or family to take responsibility for the editorial content, not a pure profit seeker. Facebook has it both ways and typically denies it has editorial control.

IMO, the flaw of markets is that they are short sighted. Sometimes this allows states to outmaneuver them with a longer view. Current exhibit A: China. Historically state intervention has been worse in the long run. But who knows. If we went into a depression a lot of people may think state intervention is a better system, as many admired the USSR during the Great Depression.

Berkshire Hathaway is possibly the most famous from the 80s/90s. The class A shares are significantly more expensive and proportionately even more powerful than the class B shares. The lower price version was important back when physical exchanges didn’t support fractional shares as they do today.

Copied from google's response to "new york times governance"

Google's AI also says that the NYT has had that structure since 1957.

Ford has something similar from the 1930s. (Dodge did too until it was bought.) Raylon (synthetic textiles) did it in the 1920s and the company behind Jack Daniels did it right after Prohibition.

Google says that the NYSE banned dual-class between 1926 and 1986; I don't know how to reconcile that with Ford.

https://site.warrington.ufl.edu/ritter/ipo-data/

And his data shows that IPOs for the most part perform about as well as their respective market. That is large multi-billion dollar IPOs perform about as well as the broad market, and smaller IPOs (which constitute the vast majority of IPOs) perform about as well as other small-cap companies.

In other words, investing in IPOs doesn't give much of an advantage or disadvantage compared to investing in other similarly sized companies.

What's true is that most stocks, including IPOs, don't do well in the long run. The half-life of a publicly traded company is something like 10 years.

"Is the company market cap low? Do they have a decent product? Is it plausible they'll 10x? Yes -> Buy some amount I can afford loosing"

For example, Tesla IPO'd at $5B cap, it was perfectly plausible to believe they'd be worth $50B some day. Shopify IPO'd at $1.3B, Square at $3B, 10x was perfectly believable. Uber IPO'd at $75B, I did not believe they'd be worth $750B any time soon, or ever. Do I believe SpaceX will be worth 20T in like 10 years? Lol. Fmao even.

Today's IPOs at $1T+ means that private money figured this out and cut the retail public out, IPOs seems to be a really terrible deal these days.