I did some ‘back of the napkin’ math a few days ago to see what it would take for the employees in my company to purchase enough shares for a controlling stake in the company. I figured that we’d never get 100% of the employees to buy in, but we also don’t need 100% of the shares, so to keep it easy I calculated if 60% bought 60% of the shares… and it would cost each employee around $2.3 million.
That tells me that each employee provides $2.3 million worth of value to the company… and we’re not getting paid anywhere near that. Not even close.
Why is this highly upvoted? This is just a poor understanding of economics.
The market cap just shows the aggregate value of shares that are being publicly traded. It has nothing to do with labor value. You can’t derive labor value from the market cap because there’s no correlation. If you want to find out how much each employee contributes, you would have to use something like company revenue.
If you want to compare it to salaries, I think you would need to do the year-over-year change. But even that wouldn’t factor in all the bloated C-suite bonuses and such, so I feel like the calculations would end up being much more complex.
For instance, if you work somewhere for 23 years making on average $100,000 per year, you’ll have received about $2.3 million from that company over time. If that company’s market cap increases by $2.3 million per employee in that course of time, then you would be about even by your metric.
gotcha. What about assets? Im not an accounting person, but we routinely buy tooling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Raw materials have costs/value associated with them. How would that figure in?
I did some ‘back of the napkin’ math a few days ago to see what it would take for the employees in my company to purchase enough shares for a controlling stake in the company. I figured that we’d never get 100% of the employees to buy in, but we also don’t need 100% of the shares, so to keep it easy I calculated if 60% bought 60% of the shares… and it would cost each employee around $2.3 million.
That tells me that each employee provides $2.3 million worth of value to the company… and we’re not getting paid anywhere near that. Not even close.
Why is this highly upvoted? This is just a poor understanding of economics.
The market cap just shows the aggregate value of shares that are being publicly traded. It has nothing to do with labor value. You can’t derive labor value from the market cap because there’s no correlation. If you want to find out how much each employee contributes, you would have to use something like company revenue.
Company value is just the result of shareholders expectations for the future company value. It doesn’t directly reflect the employees worth
this is interesting to me. can you show your work? Id be interested in going through the thought experiment as well.
Market cap is around $141 billion.
Number of employees is around 60,000.
60% of employees: 36,000.
60% of market cap: $84 billion.
$84B / 36,000 = $2.33 million.
If you want to compare it to salaries, I think you would need to do the year-over-year change. But even that wouldn’t factor in all the bloated C-suite bonuses and such, so I feel like the calculations would end up being much more complex.
For instance, if you work somewhere for 23 years making on average $100,000 per year, you’ll have received about $2.3 million from that company over time. If that company’s market cap increases by $2.3 million per employee in that course of time, then you would be about even by your metric.
gotcha. What about assets? Im not an accounting person, but we routinely buy tooling for hundreds of thousands of dollars. Raw materials have costs/value associated with them. How would that figure in?
Those are operating costs, I’m referring to control of the board of directors.
Market cap doesnt reflect the value of labor, its purely speculative these days.
These days?
So get to shitposting!
You should subtract initial investments in the company, value of real estate owned, value of machines etc.