If you work for Google or Apple, stock options give you a chance to share in the increasing value of the company. In the N.F.L., nothing like this happens; the players, though rich, are just working stiffs like the rest of us.
Sentiment: NEGATIVE
When you give chief executives too much compensation in stock options, they concentrate too much on the stock price, and there is a perverse incentive to raise the stock price, particularly when the chief executive wants to exercise his own options.
There's a lot of businesses that are working hard, who are at the top of their games. Therefore, it's always going to be a market share fight.
In confusing stock options with ownership, corporations confuse trappings with substance.
Sometimes it takes longer to create value, but if the companies generate more earnings, the stocks will ultimately reflect that.
Everyone has the idea of owning good companies. The problem is that they have high prices in relations to assets and earnings, and that takes all of the fun out of the game.
When companies are private, founders can share more about their future dreams with investors; report less; and the shares are illiquid, constraining short-term changes in valuation.
If all you needed to do is to figure out what company is better than others, everyone would make a lot of money. But that is not the case. They keep raising the prices to the point when the odds change.
I think businesses live longer that are on the stock market.
When I was in the private sector, one characteristic that differentiated the best entrepreneurs from the others was that they were not in it for the stock options, but for a mission - to deliver something that was helpful... Every entrepreneurial journey, it turns out, is like this.
Shareholders share in the downside and not necessarily in the upside; that's the whole story.