That's not really a good analogy. Suppose someone decided to offer one of their securities (or pay a dividend, or give some 'thing') to everyone who has one of your company's shares. All investors have to do is show a share certificate, and get a one-off gift proportional to how many they own.
If the new thing has value, your company's shares should all go up in value by roughly its value. Then shares which have already had the thing claimed, should go down by the same amount, leaving them roughly where they were before. If you decide not to claim the thing, you lose out by its value, but your original shares are still the same and you shouldn't have made a loss on them, just as a result of this split.
Of course, if the new thing is something which competes with your company, your company's shares might go down in response. But this isn't directly related to the value of a share in the new thing.
Should.
It's more like someone saying to all the shareholders of Apple "hey, you like companies that make mobile phones, and I've started a great mobile phone company, and I think it'd be great if you were a shareholder in my company too, so I've sent you some shares in my company too, I hope you like them!"
Is that a thing you could do? Yes.
Does it benefit you in any way? Probably not. There's certainly no reason to think it increases the value of your company.
Does it hurt Apple in any way? Almost certainly not. I mean, if everyone decided your startup was much cooler than Apple, then it might, but it's hard to see how you mailing strangers shares would bring that about.
A bitcoin fork is, in some ways, a little bit like a stock split or a dividend, but it's a lot more like someone randomly mailing strangers scraps of paper which are almost certainly worthless.
So far there's only been one successful hardfork of Bitcoin (Bitcoin Cash) in all its history. Anyone can try, but few succeed.
Having resources doesn't matter, it's a hype-based economy
Litecoin is a fork of the Bitcoin core codebase, but its blockchain is not rooted in the Bitcoin blockchain (i.e. Bitcoin owners did not automatically inherit Litecoin at the time of that fork).
Not a stupid question at all. The answer is: sure, anybody can start a new fork.
From a philosophical point of view, the alternative is that only a few designated somebodies can fork, which goes against the design goal of a having a fully decentralised network with no privileged nodes.
You can also see this as a distributed systems problem. A fork is just a divergence in the consensus layer. These happen all the time as short-lived forks when different miners produce different blocks with different sets of transactions. Typically, one of those forks gets abandoned immediately — only occasionally do you see a second block mined on the losing branch. In this sense, and from a technical perspective, the only thing that's special about the Segwit2X fork was planned for the coming weeks is that it would also change the consensus rules (by enabling larger blocks, up to 2MB from the current 1MB). Because the consensus rules change is a highly politicised issue, there's a distinct probability that whichever side ended up losing would decide to continue building on their own chain anyhow, thus effectively breaking the currency into two.
Prices of cryptocurrencies are very unstable even without any forks, so what you are describing doesn't make any sense.
Let's say, I invested in the original Bitcoin. Then somebody who has the marketing resources to build enough interest in a new coin comes along and decides to fork. Because of the hype around the new coin type, enough people are willing to trade it after the fork.
I'm being given the same number of coins of the forked kind and the value of my original coins drops by the difference in value compared to the new coins (or around that).
If I'd rather only invest in the original Bitcoin, I'd have to sell the forked coins immediately and buy the original Bitcoin back just to keep my investment value the same.
If anybody can come along and fork:
That sounds like in the world of stocks, a competitor could come along and decide to split the stocks of MY company from the outside, driving down the price of my stocks (me as the company's owner or investor) and there's nothing I can do about it.