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Thumbs Up
@thumbsup.eth
If stocks didn’t exist, Elon, Bezos, and Thiel wouldn’t be megabillionaires. They’d have to pay themselves and their investors with real income not with this funny money that they can’t actually sell without it rapidly depreciating. All of the insane things rich people do with borrowing money to acquire things essentially for free is because stocks exist, and thus merely eliminating one thing (shares of companies) would radically reshape the world we live in, what wealth means, and the nature of power. Discuss.
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shazow
@shazow.eth
Ugh I just wrote a short essay thinking through this but Warpcast lost it. Quick rewrite summary of thinking aloud (not directly addressing your point, just pretext): I'm not convinced that it's *technically* practical/possible to force non-transferable non-uniform equity. It makes me think of soulbound tokens, in the way that it's not technically possible (I can always just sell my private key), but it is practically possible to make it annoying to trade them (tightly couple various social commitments that need to be unwound first). It also makes me think of how we like to think of voting rights as non-financial/egalitarian, but in reality they do have market value -- related metaphor is how we're building a market of utility around restaking with things like Eigenlayer. High level: there are some "natural" properties that are unavoidable, but we can find ways to tame them (perhaps by tightly coupling them with things that produce positive externalities). More directly applied thoughts below:
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shazow
@shazow.eth
Even if there is no formal stocks and stock market, we can imagine internal ledgers (read: spreadsheet) of "ownership" or control or deferred rights to future dividends/income or whatever you want to call it. When we try to get a loan for our restaurant from a bank, it is valued against future cash flow as an equity. When we go to a VC and get funding for our corp, it's the same process (via SAFE or whatever side note). Same for secondary markets of non-public corps (we do an out-of-band contract for deferred rights to some liquidity events). Are we just categorically outlawing all forms of debts/loans and contracts thereof? Clearly companies can be "valued" externally based on some formula (used by banks, VCs, whatever who can trade these abstracted equities). Is there a material difference of operating a company valued at a trillion dollars and having deferred rights to various aspects of this company that I can sign away to third parties, vs being "valued at hundreds of billions of dollars"?
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