"…For Nvidia, after this latest run-up took it north of the $3T milestone, the company is being valued at more than $100M for each of its 29,600 employees (per its filing that counted up to the end of Jan 2024).
That’s more than 5x any of its big tech peers, and hundreds of times higher than more labor-intensive companies like Walmart and Amazon. It is worth noting that Nvidia has very likely done some hiring since the end of January — I think the company might be in growth mode — but even if the HR department has been working non-stop, Nvidia will still be a major outlier on this simple measure.
We are running out of ways to describe Nvidia’s recent run… but a nine-figure valuation per employee is a new one."
The share price literally wouldn’t be what it was if people weren’t literally buying pieces of it at that price. So it’s very literally saying what the company is worth on the open market. Even with all your obfuscation, that’s still the case.
Please explain to me how any of the child level explanation of the stock market is obfuscation, or again how you think the market cap, a purely theoretical number, could possibly be redistributed to employees outside of things the company already does to some extent, and finally why it applies in this case with a company who’s stock price is based purely on speculation about what it could do in the future and not anything it’s employees are currently doing.
Also from your comment about how share price literally is the only measure of value for a company I’m taking it you follow the theroy of value that value directly equals the amount of money paid for it, which seems inherently contradictory to this entire conversation.
The value of anything is what people are willing to pay for it, full stop.
Then by definition the employees are perfectly compensated for the value of their labor, as that labor can only be worth exactly what the company pays for it, and there is absolutely no reason why they should get any more. That’s actually one of the reasons why the value = money theory tends to be pretty rare outside of the far right libertarianism.
Honestly I can’t argue with that. That’s the reality of the situation. But emotionally they still deserve a bigger piece of what they created.