I mean the person running the company, for SMB that might be the owner, for bigco it's the C-suite, because those are the people that affect my ability to do my job effectively, which has a huge impact on my day-to-day emotional well-being. Investors are a whole different story, and it's wise to de-couple financial considerations from job satisfaction as much as possible. Being resentful that my work passively benefits investors would be a silly distraction—they will be there seeking returns via investment regardless of where I seek employment. What really matters to my financially is my own salary, equity and the upside of the company where I am devoting most of my time.

But don't you think it's weird to resent a lazy boss more than passive owners who don't work at all for that income?

So, how many bad investments did you have?

When investing in a corporation, there is no guarantee that you will gain profit from it, you can even lose your entire investment.

If you were a long-term Nokia shareholder, you would have lost a lot of money since, say, 2005.

When you invest, you put the value of your previous work at stake. You can retroactively sink your work (= money that you earned from it) into a black hole.

The retirement account managers make the decisions on the investments, not me.

> When you invest, you put the value of your previous work at stake.

What was the "previous work" I did when I inherited my father's Walmart stock?

> The retirement account managers make the decisions on the investments, not me.

Let us hope that they won't get sucked into plots of the next Bernie Madoff, who will likely come one day.

> What was the "previous work" I did when I inherited my father's Walmart stock?

True, I was thinking about investments of surpluses from your salary.

Considering the structure of the economy it is far more likely for assets to inflate than the income of workers. Sure some higher up people could wake up and reverse this trend but if there was a risk of this happening most workers would already be happy with their current economic situation.

You are pretty far off with "most business owners". Maybe you could claim "most" of the passive shareholders of public companies do nothing for that money but that is a very small minority of "business owners". Most businesses are small businesses and most small business owners bust their ass to make a decent living.

Small business mythology is pretty far from reality. Most of the economy is run by large firms, owned by people who receive revenue by virtue of ownership rather than work.