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.
Would that market cap be so high if all those employees were paid that extra million yearly?
Yes, that is what I meant by simplification.
On the other hand Google as search engine and ads (the part that makes money) needs fraction of the employees alphabet has. If they had to pay them that much, they would have never hired most of them.
If they had to pay them that much, they would have never hired most of them.
exactly. A company tant doesnt overexplore its workers cannot grow like alphabet did. The underpayment of the workers is an essential feature of alphabet, and part of what makes its market capitalization that high.
This implies that the answer to my question is “no”: if the workers had been paid properly from the start, there wouldnt be the discrepancy that makes the founder billionaires.
