Who Owns Nebula?

i'm disappointed in brian mcmanus every time i watch a 'real engineering' video and find out that it's full of factual inaccuracies, like all the previous 'real engineering' videos i watched. you'd think i'd learn, but i keep confusing him with 'practical engineering', which is actually real

To me, there's no evidence in any of this that would indicate the creators are misinformed or being scammed. In reality, they know their primary source of revenue is coming from Youtube, and it is a frequent complaint, especially for content creators who do anything marginally political or controversial, that they are demonetized or hit with copyright strikes (even in clear cases of fair use) and have to deal with the faceless Google behemoth trying to reverse these automated decisions. The end result of all this is that their revenue stream is unstable, and they are reminded of it frequently.

To me, the fact that many of them clearly find Nebula a more suitable arrangement for them is still an indicator to me that, if I want to support the creators, Nebula is a better way to do that. Obviously, you can make your own decision on that, and sure, if you feel lied to, I can appreciate being upset about that. But maybe most of these content creators are less concerned with the ownership (they get 0% stake in Google, after all) and more concerned with the profit sharing arrangement. If so, I'm still happy to support them in that.

The accusations of it being a scam are speculative for sure, but they come from a relatable place: the inability to understand why creators would agree to take on "shadow equity" while a small handful of creators get actual real equity.

It sounds like a few creators can sell the equity that is built by many creators at any time, but that all the other creators can only realize their equity if and when the company exits.

If someone bought tickets to a steam ship that stipulated that in the event of an imminent iceberg collision, they can only get on the life-boats after a small group of people ransacked the ship and left on the first life-boat, I might assume that they'd been scammed to. But perhaps they were just desperate or didn't think icebergs were a risk. Regardless, I just know I wouldn't buy that ticket.

A lot of Corporate financial reports have a baseline of $1k, $10k, $100k or sometimes even $1 million that their figures and charts never have reason to drop below (or are just taken as rounding errors) anywhere in the report and so they just establish the baseline early in the report and all numbers are relative to that. It seems like Curiosity Stream's report was using a $1k baseline and you just multiply all the financial numbers by 1,000.

Ownership of private property (abstract or concrete) is a formal, legally-defined concept — and "do you have essentially sovereign authority over the disposition of the asset" is always at the core of it.

No, you don't own stock when you own stock options. A stock option is a right to purchase stock at a particular price, and you own that right. Just like owning, say, an easement on a piece of land, doesn't mean you own the land. (And both a stock option and an easement have a value, and you may be able to sell those things themselves — but the value they have, and their sale price, is often disconnected from that of the underlying asset the right exercises against.)

You know how you can very easily tell when you own something? Because governments almost always tax transfer of ownership of a thing. You don't pay taxes when you acquire options, because you haven't yet acquired ownership over anything. You do pay taxes when you exercise those options — exercise that right to acquire stock at that price — because now you do own something you didn't before.

Another way to tell that you own a thing, is that you have the ability to directly pledge that thing as collateral on a loan. You can pledge stock, but you can't pledge options[1]. This is because you can contractually grant the bank the ability to confiscate your stock in event of default on the loan, in a way that guarantees that they will succeed in this confiscation. But you can't contractually grant the bank the ability to confiscate your options, in a way that is guaranteed to succeed.

And that's for exactly the reasons you outline: there may be contractual stipulation on the exercise of the options, that mean that the bank can't immediately liquidate the options, and thereby can't balance the loss-of-lendable-assets coming from your default and/or might risk the company's share-price falling, or even the company going bankrupt, before the options may be exercised.

Also, sometimes the bank wouldn't want to exercise a contingent asset they've acquired, but just wants to sell that contingent asset on to someone else who wants to hold and exercise it at a future date. ESOPs in particular usually have voidability clauses that say that not only can't you transfer the option, you can't even build a financial instrument around the option that has the semantics of transferability. Banks very much do not appreciate restrictions like that.

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[1] Yes, you can show your holding of options as a demonstration of assets, to increase the amount a bank is willing to lend you. But this, like any other demonstration of assets — e.g. a demonstration of employment, or of ownership of revenue-generating assets — goes into a Net Present Value-adjusted future-cashflow projection calculation that the bank does, to determine how likely you will be to be able to make your regular loan payments when everything is going well for you. In the breach, they still need collateral to be pledged out of stuff you actually own — i.e. can guarantee them the right to as a creditor.