| > Corporations are a legal fiction by which power is granted to people, so, no, that's not what is “really happening”. Corporations obscure the real distribution of power. The point is that corporations distort the real distribution of power. Apple's money nominally belongs to its shareholders, but in practice it's under the control of their executives, and they have many perverse incentives derived out of everything from personal enrichment at the expense of the shareholders to tax avoidance to empire building. Moreover, even under the set of incentives they're "supposed" to have, it means that a significant chunk of the economy is set toward advancing the interests of the fictional entity Apple Inc. even if its interests are not aligned with any individual person. > Not so diffuse; the set of major capitalists is very small compared to the whole population, and the share of stock (and overall wealth) they control is quite large. It's diffuse even then. Jeff Bezos is the richest man, has more than a hundred billion dollars, most of that money is in his own company, and yet even then he doesn't have majority ownership of even that company. An "ordinary" billionaire, i.e. someone with a billion dollars, could invest 100% of their money into Apple and still barely own 0.1% of it. Moreover, nearly all of the wealth of the rich is invested in corporations. Those investments yield returns, but the corporations are controlled far more by their executives than the nominal owners. Most importantly, that wouldn't change even if there were less "wealth inequality" unless the corporations were also made smaller -- it would in fact get worse, because the ownership would be even more diffuse, leaving the executives with even less accountability. |
That's not the claim that was made, which was the corporations are the real holders of power, which was offered as an explicit denial of the claim that a narrow set of wealthy individuals hold power. That corporations are a vehicle by which the exact distribution of power among individuals may vary from what you'd think by looking at net worth alone does not change the fact that power is really held by a narrow set of wealthy individuals. (In fact, it concentrates power even more narrowly in the most wealthy by suppressing the effective power of the diffuse minority of wealth held by broad masses in a way somewhat similar to how FPTP electoral systems dilute the political power of diffuse minorities of votes.)
> Apple's money nominally belongs to its shareholders
No, it nominally belongs to Apple. Shareholders do not, either nominally or practically, own the assets of the corporation, they own a claim to a share of the liquidated net assets after satifying liabilities in the event of corporate dissolution, along with certain rights defined in law and corporate governance documents with regard to governance of the corporation while it is a going concern.
In practice, this increases the effective relative power of major (even if not majority individually) shareholders and reduces the power of small minority shareholders beyond what share of ownership alone would suggest.