• sudo@lemmy.today
    link
    fedilink
    arrow-up
    15
    arrow-down
    7
    ·
    3 months ago

    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? <Shocked Pikachu>

    • cygnus@lemmy.ca
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      12
      arrow-down
      6
      ·
      3 months ago

      Did they get their fair share of that ‘grossly overpaying’ by Yahoo?

      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.

      • grue@lemmy.world
        link
        fedilink
        English
        arrow-up
        10
        arrow-down
        9
        ·
        3 months ago

        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.

        • save_the_humans@leminal.space
          link
          fedilink
          English
          arrow-up
          6
          ·
          3 months ago

          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.

    • aesthelete@lemmy.world
      link
      fedilink
      arrow-up
      5
      arrow-down
      1
      ·
      3 months ago

      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.