A lot more than me, but that's not him taking my wealth. I'm in a voluntary relationship with his company, I've agreed to my salary, and if I'm unhappy with my pay, I'm free to find other work.
He's (well, the shareholders) still taking the surplus value of the work of all employees while they did most of said work. And you may be in a voluntary relationship but for many people, such a relationship is required to survive and it may not be so easy to find work elsewhere (especially when you're not in tech).
Do you allow for this to work both ways? For example, when the company tanks, the shareholders take the brunt of the losses, while most of the employees (at least the types of employees that are on HN) likely move on to another job at another company without much trouble...
You can't count the upsides for the shareholders without counting the downsides as well.
How do they "take the brunt of the losses" when the company tanks in a limited liability model ? unless you mean the actual loss of their stocks, and (at least most of the time) the lack of compensation for them ? because in that case what they're losing are the very tokens of ownership that allowed them to extract the aforementioned surplus value unfairly - the tokens that in my view should mainly belong to the actual value producers.
That's not to say that investors shouldn't be compensated for their initial risks when an actual funds injection is required, mind you; but them being compensated ad vitam eternam - and more generally, them actually owning the structure - makes very little sense morally for me (and beyond "morally", I don't see how this can result in anything else than progressive concentration of wealth society-wide in the long term).
You also assume people can "move on to another job" without too much trouble; again, that may hold true in tech or similar popular domains but it's far from true for a lot of people.
That presumes the job market is perfectly efficient but inn reality it isn't. Back in 2015 Apple and Google (among others) being convicted of breaking the law to suppress wages. It was broken before that lawsuit however, and you can bet that the job market hasn't magically been fixed since they settled.
it doesn't have anything to do with the company. before companies existed you still had to work to survive. it was of a different nature, but you have always had to gather and manage resources to stay alive.
Yes, and I'm not disputing that. What we're discussing though is the fact that CEOs make around 200x what their employees make and that you are required to help them uphold their standard of living if you want to eat or have health care regardless of which CEO you work for.
A corporation is a model of communist dictatorship. The higher-ups control the means of production, they take your labor according to your ability and give to you your need (as determined by them.) In the sense that existing in a communist dictatorship is 'voluntary' then your work for the company is voluntary. And in the sense that being able to move from one communist dictatorship to another communist dictatorship is free then you are free.
