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Rival versions of capitalism The endangered public company The rise and fall of a great invention, and why it matters May 19th 2012 | from the print edition AS THIS newspaper went to press, Facebook was about to become a public company. It will be one of the biggest stockmarket flotations ever: the social-networking giant expects investors to value it at $100 billion or so. The news raises several questions, from “Is it worth that much?” to “What will it do next?” But the most intriguing question is what Facebook’s flotation tells us about the state of the public company itself.(lead-in) At first glance, all is well. The public company was invented in the mid-19th century to provide the giants of the industrial age with capital. That Facebook is joining Microsoft and Google on the stockmarket suggests that public listings are performing the same miracle for the internet age. Not every 19th-century invention has weathered so well.(history) In this section ?The endangered public company  HYPERLINK /nodeThe Greek run  HYPERLINK /nodeSpring can come again  HYPERLINK /nodeRethink the reset  HYPERLINK /nodeThe Brazil backlash  HYPERLINK /nodeCounter revolution  HYPERLINK /rights Reprints But look closer and the picture changes (see? HYPERLINK /node\t _self article). Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s young founder, resisted going public for as long as he could, not least because so many heads of listed companies advised him to. He is taking the plunge only because American law requires any firm with more than a certain number of shareholders to publish quarterly accounts just as if it were listed. Like Google before it, Facebook has structured itself more like a private firm than a public one: Mr Zuckerberg will keep most of the voting rights, for example.(转折) The number of public companies has fallen dramatically over the past decade—by 38% in America since 1997 and 48% in Britain. The number of in