Comment on When we eat the billionaires, we should spare Gabe Newell? No?

• AnyOldName3@lemmy.world ⁨14⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

  It doesn’t have publicly-traded shares because it’s a private company, but it’s still correct to say someone has stock in a private company that they own part or all of. Like with physical objects, they don’t stop existing just because they’re not for sale to the public. It’s an easy mistake to make, though, as the vast majority of the time people talk about stocks and shares it’s in the context of buying and selling publicly-traded stock.

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  • Cooper8@feddit.online ⁨12⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

    It is nitpicking, but in legal terms you could say he has shares in the company but not stocks. Stocks refers specifically to publicly traded shares, that is to say shares sold on a stock market. Shares is the more broad term as it can refer not only to stocks but also private equity units of various types. Valve is a Limited Liability Corporation, or LLC, which have Membership Units as the type of shares held by owners, which differs from stocks both in terms of tax treatment and limitations on how they can be transacted.

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    • AnyOldName3@lemmy.world ⁨7⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

      It’s nitpicking and also not quite right. Stock of a corportation is shares, whether or not they’re publicly traded. It becomes plural when it’s shares of multiple corporation.

      However, LLCs aren’t corporations at all (the C is Company), and in the US, stock is specifically of corporations. I’m in the UK, where the equivalent to an LLC’s shares are still considered stock, and I’ve been googling whether private corporations have stock in the US, which they do, so the confusion’s been that the public/private distinction isn’t the important one and I’ve been arguing the definition of a word that’s defined differently in the relevant country.

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      • Cooper8@feddit.online ⁨5⁩ ⁨hours⁩ ago

        hahahaha, what a mess.

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