Alphabet (google parent), based on employee numbers had about 1,550,000 man years of work put into it in its entire history 1.
Alphabets current market capitalization is 2.5 trillion dollars.
If each employee was paid an extra million $ yearly in addition to what they were already paid (excluding stocks), there would still be almost a trillion dollars left over for the founders and investors.
Now sure, I had to make a lot of simplifications to calculate this, but even so, it should give you an idea just how valuable Google actually is, compared to the amount of work put into it.
So unless your definition of fair is something along the lines of splitting the profits evenly among employees, then they absolutely could have become billionaires while paying people fairly.
Would that market cap be so high if all those employees were paid that extra million yearly? Market caps depend on more than the actual value of the company’s product to society.
That massively depends on what you consider fair.
Is a million dollars a year fair?
Alphabet (google parent), based on employee numbers had about 1,550,000 man years of work put into it in its entire history 1.
Alphabets current market capitalization is 2.5 trillion dollars.
If each employee was paid an extra million $ yearly in addition to what they were already paid (excluding stocks), there would still be almost a trillion dollars left over for the founders and investors.
Now sure, I had to make a lot of simplifications to calculate this, but even so, it should give you an idea just how valuable Google actually is, compared to the amount of work put into it.
So unless your definition of fair is something along the lines of splitting the profits evenly among employees, then they absolutely could have become billionaires while paying people fairly.
Would that market cap be so high if all those employees were paid that extra million yearly? Market caps depend on more than the actual value of the company’s product to society.