[pfdietz]

> At best, they are trading baseball cards with your corporate logo on them.

Those baseball cards also come with some rights. The people running the company have a fiduciary responsibility to them. They cannot, for example, use the company as a piggybank.

[shadowgovt]

But especially in the case of Google, those rights do not extend to setting the values, direction, or priorities of the company.

Nobody outside of the founders has enough of a controlling stake for that to be practically possible.