this post was submitted on 22 Aug 2024
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Building the company isn't what made him a billionaire. Yahoo grossly overpaying for it is what made him a billionaire.
And who profited, disproportionately, from the company's acquisition by Yahoo? The employees who worked to build it into what it was?
Did they get their fair share of that 'grossly overpaying' by Yahoo?
They didn't?
If they owned shares, yes. If they didn't, then why should they? The owners of the company sold the company at a massively overinflated valuation, so the shares were "worth" a lot of money. This really isn't a complicated situation.
Because they did all the work!
Work and ownership are not the same. If I hire a plumber to fix something in my house, does he become a part owner of it?
If you hire a plumber, you do it as a customer and not an employer. Quite a difference!
A customer pays the full value of the purchase, the plumber is the one in charge and charges as much as possible. That's how they make profit. That's why you still own your toilet, the plumber already got the full value they were owed.
An employer never pays the full value, though! The employer, as the one in charge, pays as little as possible. They pockst the difference as profit. That means the employees are always cheated out of the full value of their labor, they are never paid what they are actually worth.
Except here we're talking about ownership/shares, not payment for labour. Many in this thread are outraged that not every employee of Broadcast owned shares, and the implication is that as soon as you work for someone, you should receive a share. My plumber example still stands. Should he get a "share" of my house, even though I already paid him for his labour, as Cuban paid his employees?
Again,we're talking about shares, not labour. For all you know Cuban was drawing zero salary from the company. The two are completely different. You're all so doctrinaire that you can't mentally distinguish labour versus ownership of a thing.
Your plumber doesn't own a share of your toilet because you actually paid them what they are worth, because they can demand it from you. They have all the power in that relationship.
No employee is ever paid what they are worth. They can't be, if they were then the company could never make a profit. That's literally where profit comes from - it's all surplus value created by the workers. Hence, they should get a share of the company.
Funny you mention that! Broadcast.com was in fact not profitable. It lost millions the year it was sold to Yahoo.
And who got the profit from that sale?
So the company never operated at a profit - it was profitable in the end, was it not? And who created all of that profit? Who sacrificed for the company and were never paid what they were worth to make it good enough to sell in the first place?
So if I sell my house at a loss because I'm inept, the plumber should get an even bigger share of the sale money?
The plumber was already paid the full value he was worth because the power dynamics are entirely different.
A company that can't turn a profit isn't doing so because it's paying the workers the full value of their labor. That's absurd. Is that what you think happened? Do you think the workers were being paid such extravagant wages that the company couldn't profit?
Obviously not. Why do you think the company became valueable enough to buy in the first place? It took the stolen surplus value created by the workers and reinvested into itself over-and-over, becoming a valuable company even if it couldn't turn a profit. No one would buy a company because it's worthless. They do it because it's valuable, and all the value comes from the workers.
You should familiarise yourself with the details of this particular transaction, because your idealised description bears very little resemblance to what actually happened. There's a reason this is known as one of the worst business deals of all time.
Okay, so he was an inept dipshit?
Sounds like he didn't deserve any of the money, actually.
In fact, the company clearly would have been better off if he wasn't involved at all and it was a worker co-op instead.
lol alright I'm done, you're clearly too busy fighting strawmen because your arguments don't make any sense regarding the topic at hand.
Because the only ethical kind of company is a worker-owned co-op. It should not have been possible for employees to not own shares, but it was, and that's bad.
I personally try to avoid absolutes. I would have probably said, "a more ethical kind of company...", but totally agree. Also really wish more people understood and supported co-ops.
So you believe that workers should pay to work at a company that is operating at a loss, right?
I sort of agree with you that you can only become a billionaire by stealing someone else's money, but in this case I think your argument is kind of bad.
If Yahoo overpaid, it's not the employees of his own company that Cuban took the money from, but rather indirectly from Yahoo's employees (former and current up to that point).
I also have to say, as far as ethics goes, there is enough indirection there that unless you were a dyed in the wool communist you would have problems finding fault with it. The shell game sufficiently blurred where the capital originally came from and it looks more like winning the lottery than exploiting your employees to the people receiving the big paychecks.
Similar things can be said about venture capital recipients. They get money, and obviously it's money that the people who gave it to them did not do sufficient work for them to have gotten it themselves, but the source of that money is so convoluted that it might as well be gambling profits.
I'm not actually saying it's ethical, and I referred to it being a shell game. I wasn't talking about shell companies. Awesome meme though great job! 👍