[avalys]

Do you think founders should retain ownership of the companies they create?

Fred Smith’s wealth comes from the notional value of his ownership of a small fraction of an enormously successful and societally useful business. It’s not as if he has a bank account with billions of dollars in profits paid as salary in it, which you seem to believe.

On what basis do you think he should have been compelled to sell his stake in the company he created?

Yes, you’re correct that he didn’t earn a billion dollars. He created a company that investors value at $60B, and his remaining 6% share of it is worth $4B. That $60B was not taken from anyone. It was created - out of thin air - by organizing workers in a way that the world needed.

[beaconstudios]

> Do you think founders should retain ownership of the companies they create?

No. The idea that a company is something you "own" rather than a group of people doing some kind of economic activity is a social construct, and one designed to disenfranchise the people doing the ongoing work. A company is a collection of assets and people - to own assets makes sense, to own other people's labour in an ongoing capacity does not.

> On what basis do you think he should have been compelled to sell his stake in the company he created?

I don't think he should - I think we should change the system that allows people to be worth billions off the backs of others. I don't want redistribution, I want reform.

[AnimalMuppet]

So, FedEx owns a bunch of airplanes. Billions and billions of dollars worth of airplanes. Who bought them? The owners bought them. So you have three options:

1. The owners get some property rights ("ownership") for the money they put up to buy the airplanes and related other tools. Or,

2. When an employee is hired by FedEx, they have to come up with... something of the order of $60 billion / 100,000 employees, to pay your share of the enterprise you are becoming part of. Or,

3. We as a society don't have any capital-intensive companies. Who's going to buy the tools, if the one putting up the money doesn't get ownership? (And don't say "government". Government running private enterprise almost always winds up with too much mismanagement and graft.)

[beaconstudios]

These are valid concerns to raise, but can be addressed. In actuality, the investors (which can also be the owners but not necessarily) provide the company with capital to purchase these planes. That, or the company uses its own profits to do so. Either way, the money is the property of the company, not the owners.

In the former (investor) case the payment can be structured as a loan, and/or investors can become stakeholders as part of a multi-stakeholder cooperative, with their own cut of the earnings. In the latter case it's no issue because the company is buying things with its own resources.