Then why do you assert only a stake in equity and influence on strategy warrants a share of profits? Or do I misunderstand?
I did say “outside of [company performance related] bonuses”.
That’s kind of an arbitrary exclusion, isn’t it? You oppose equity sharing except where you don’t.
Giving a portion of the profit as a bonus is not the same thing as giving equity in the company.
And yet, I received stock grants despite having zero influence on company strategy.
If a company has a bad year, they don’t have to pay bonuses. If they give raises in the good years, they can’t take it back when things go wrong.
You may have missed where I said there was a floor and no one received nothing.
If you were a VP, you are certainly at a high enough level to have some level of influence over the company. Not a ton, but then, I doubt your stock options amounted to more than a fraction of a percent of the company’s total stocks.
In a Fortune 100 firm there are likely thousands (at least hundreds) of first line VPs. At my firm there were probably two or three dozen people who had any meaningful influence on company strategy. The rest of us were the tactical forces that implemented the strategy.
My firm also offered a stock purchase program to all employees, where the price was a function of company performance (always at a discount).
Ownership was encouraged and rewarded.
I know? That’s why I think a fraction of a percent of the stock sounds about right for people at that rank.
I didn’t say that a VP was high ranked enough to make strategic decisions, I said that they were high ranked enough that the way they do their job has a significant influence on how the company performs.
Companies offer all kinds of benefits to employees, and people who have nothing to do with a company can buy stock as well.
There’s nothing wrong with stock options. The question is whether companies have a moral imperative to give ownership over the company to employees, and I think the answer is very much no.
Why not? Why isn’t it the right and moral thing to do? Because they don’t have to?
And your dismissal of what I posted sounds like a “No true Scotsman” argument. “Sure employees can share in equity. But it’s not enough to count.”
No one is arguing an assembly line worker should become a majority owner. Only that their contribution should be recognized, valued, and lead to some commensurate share in equity. And that’s what my firm did.
Because the employer and employee agreed on wages for the specific labor rendered by the employee, and they get paid for that labor regardless of whether the business is successful or fails?
First, no, bonuses are not “sharing in equity”. After you get your bonus, you don’t own a portion of your company.
Second, I also said that I have no problem with employee co-ops, so clearly, I’m fine with companies sharing ALL of the profits if that’s what the employees and owners (or in a coop the owning employees) want.
The questions is whether companies should be forced to operate under a profit sharing model, and my answer is no.
If profit sharing is so amazing, then companies can offer it and have a much easier time recruiting high quality employees, and then they can outcompete companies offering more traditional compensation methods. But that’s not what we see in reality, because most employees would rather just earn wages than risk getting paid in equity instead.
What do you call the money they earn if not their contribution being quite literally recognized and valued?
At the cost of being paid less in cash and getting nothing if the company fails? Why would most low level wage earners choose to take on that risk?
Let’s say 100 aliens showed up tomorrow with incredible technology. They buy some land in Texas and set up homes. They’re here because they want to build a giant space laser to blow up some far away planet.
The space laser runs on space corn, and they require an inconceivable amount of it. They gather up all the corn farmers in America and offer to give them access to some space technology in exchange for the farmers switching over to space corn (which humans can’t eat, it’s only useful for powering the space laser).
They need lots of water, so they gather up all the civil engineers and construction workers and set them to work diverting all of the water possible into Texas (by enticing them with space technology.)
When people complain that they’re losing access to food and water, they start asking their elected officials to do something about it. But the aliens simply offer the politicians space technology in exchange for being allowed to continue.
Sure, some farmers and construction workers might not go along with this because of their consciences. But enough do that life quickly gets worse for the rest of us. And because we don’t have any space technology to offer, we’re powerless to do anything about it.
That’s the problem. It’s not about ceo pay ratios, or equity in companies, or risk vs reward. It’s about the fact there are DIRE situations all over the world, situations that could be vastly improved if we could incentivise labor towards those areas. But our labor pool has been coopted by psychopaths who simply don’t care about those problems, and just want to build space lasers for their own dumb purposes.
We have no money to fix the education crisis in America. We have no money to address our looming water crisis. We have no money to address our crumbling infrastructure. We have no money to fight climate change. But we have money for things that make billionaires richer. And we won’t do anything about it because, I dunno, billionaire balls taste amazing? I’m honestly at a loss.
Our priorities are fucked.
I’m not going to repeat everything I already posted just so it can be ignored again. Have fun.
…I don’t think I ignored anything you posted, but if you were just going to repeat yourself rather than responding to my responses, we can leave it there.
Sure, that’s what we have here. Okey-dokey .
What? In one breath you’re ranting about the suspicious commonality and consistency of the message, and then in literally the same sentence ranting about the incoherence and inconsistency of it, and later about the confusion of the message.
If it’s an evil propagandist, then everybody’s message ought to be identical. If it’s organic then they should have a lot of variation. You can’t argue that polar opposite observations mean the same thing.
This is comically wrong. As others have pointed out, Americans have a long and storied history of despising the most wealthy and powerful. Perhaps in recent history some things have changed… we’ve seen the first trillionaire and the first hundred-billionaires just in the past couple of decades. That kind of thing brings the situation to a head. But it’s literally always been there.
You know what is kind of new, though? The idea that millions of your fellow citizens are bot-manipulated puppets who have no independent thoughts of their own. Where did that idea come from? Could it be from the fact that this is the position of Elon Musk, which he engergetically drives using the propaganda platform that he bought to push his own messaging? Seems suspicious!
There is probably some truth to hostile state actors driving wedges whenever and wherever they can, but it’s interesting that the only wedge issue that pings your radar as a malign foreign influence is billionaire resentment and not, say, the suspiciously coordinated-seeming stuff about “boys in girls sports”, CRT, Pizzagate, furries, etc.
You don’t find it suspicious that a country who never gave 2 shits about women’s sports suddenly is obsessed with the integrity of it? Yet it’s odd that people who can’t pay their bills are mad about a literal billionaire who’s tinkering with their day-to-day social media experience and manipulating elections? Really?
I thought it might be, but it’s worth spelling it out for people who might not understand why.
Anyhow, I’ve been hearing all these same arguments back and forth for like 50 years. And these discussion probably go back as far as Ancient Greece when philosophers first began contemplating the nature of power and civic virtue and whatnot.
I firmly believe in the statement “Power tends to corrupt, and absolute power corrupts absolutely.” And probably most of the time it corrupts because the people in power manage to convince themselves that what they are doing is moral and right. Perhaps even the will of God if you believe in such things. Well if you truly believe that you are smarter and morally superior to everyone, then that kind of makes it easy to do all sorts of objectively questionable acts in the name of the “greater good”. I also think that these people get to a point where they get frustrated and say “fuck it, there is no such thing as ‘good’ or ‘evil’, just execution of power” which just causes them to be more self-serving.
For example, I have a friend from college who is very wealthy and successful. Like he successfully sold of some tech startups in the 90s and formed a venture capital fund that has financed some well known companies.
During COVID he took exception with the way his children’s school handled lockdowns and remote learning and all that. It started as just usual social media ramblings. But then it quickly escalated into a battle with the school board. Then he’s using his wealth to start a SuperPAC to basically buy a new school board come election time. Then he’s getting caught up in all these political battles both on and offline because he’s aligning himself with all these right-wing politicians because they support his one pet issue but has this total blind spot to understanding why he’s getting characterized as a “right wing anti-vax MAGA Nazi” and it’s like “dude..look at who you support and hang out with! It’s like saying ‘I only really support Hitler because of his domestic agricultural policies’!” And six years later this nonsense is still going on and apparently there’s even a documentary about it and now his posts all have to do with this documentary.
And the whole time I’m just like “Dude! Just send your fucking kids to private school like a normal rich person!”
The point is, when people amass a lot of wealth and power the do tend to get sort of lost in their own world where it just becomes about exercising their will and how right they think they are without any regard for the consequences to ordinary people.
Even Elon Musk probably thinks he’s “doing good”. In his mind I believe he legitimately thinks he’s cutting waste that all these do-nothing idiots are just sucking out of the system.
At this moment, our environment and climate are at risk, largely due to billionaire and allied interests. Our health and life expectancy are going down, largely due to billionaire and allied interests. Our national security is at risk, and billionaire interests/whims are a huge part of it. Our very democratic system is at risk, again largely due to billionaire and allied interests.
No one should have this power. Even if Elon Musk were a decent person, he shouldn’t have this power. But in the real world he’s a malevolent scumbag, with the power to seriously impact all of the above based on his own whims. That’s not inevitable and it’s not necessary for capitalism or competition or the free market. We could make it illegal to have that kind of wealth and power, and we should. It shouldn’t be legal to have even a tenth, maybe not a hundredth, of that kind of wealth and power individually.