Earlier quoted context omitted.
It’s really the non-employee shareholders that take the value, so instead of comparing with CEO and management, you should instead be asking: “How to transfer ownership of all publicly traded shares such that they are owned solely by the employees and not non-employee investors” CEOs and management are simply there to prevent the above from happening, which is why they are paid by the board so much. The boards are th…
> not non-employee investors I must be thick, but I fail to understand how shareholders are "investors" of a publicly traded company? Yes, at some point, the company went to the market, and large sums of cash were exchanged for company shares, with the promise of a future return of part of the profit on that share. So yes, that moment could be seen as an investment. But from that point onward, holding a share of a tr…
In single share class companies then, the entirety of the “value” from a financial perspective is held in stocks and corporate bonds. Whomever owns these, has voting and control rights in a way that non-voting equity holders do not.
Notably almost no public companies give voting shares to employees- I’m sure there are examples but incredibly rare.
Shareholders benefit materially from the labor of the company by holding the asset that (theoretically) accretes value with no actual labor inputs.
That means that anyone doing labor is paying the shareholders from their paycheck every month.
Why is it like this, because the contracts people sign and the egregious power disparity makes it such that capital, the voting share holders, have ALL of the value that they can turn trade or liquidate or whatever because they gave money for shares and more shares means more power in the company. The board ultimately encourages this because they are only interested in capital returns and stock price.