From [2], SoftBank lent billions for employees to invest. That's incredible and dubious! I've been offered to purchase stock of my employer at reduced prices if I hold it for X time, but never been offered a loan to do it.

>> SoftBank lent billions for employees to invest. That's incredible and dubious!

In some ways, this is great. It shows that fund executives' interests are aligned with the long-term returns of the fund. It shows they are there for the carry returns and not just the annual admin fees. It gives execs skin in the game.

People keep saying this, but in reality all this ever seems to do is to give employees an incentive to boost the share price. If you have an employee that works hard to create long term value for the company you can review their performance at the end of the year and make a judgement that they've created long term value in a sustainable way and you can give them a big bonus or increase their salary. If you give them massive amounts of stock, suddenly you're powerless, it doesn't matter what they're doing to boost the stock price, as long as they bump the price they're going to get a good income no matter what you think of their performance.

Bonuses end up becoming political exercises. If you can keep bonuses aligned with value, that is great but I've seen otherwise many times.

Serious question - are there really many bad ways to bump up the stock price?

There is financial engineering (like stock buy-backs), you can just disallow that and remove the problem.

There is unnecessary M&A, but if the employees are running amok with unnecessary M&A, you have much bigger problems.

There are illegal things -- but we have the law to take care of that.

There are extractive measures (e.g., squeeze blood from workers, suppliers), but if that is allowed, then the "value" you see from that is likely also "value" you'd reflect on the annual bonus.

From a shareholder perspective, buybacks that raise the stock price are just fine.

Not if they company is buying back shares at an inflated valuation, which sadly too often the case.

I've heard of this happening for executives and board members at various blue chip companies.

I remember reading that these loans are often forgiven when the stock doesn’t work out as expected. It’s just another way of paying more.

This is more common in investment professions.