Owning a stock is not the same as having controlling interest in the business and being able to take home your share of profits (or suffer your share of losses) from the business. It is interesting how the mind works to confuse these two things.

Also, in the limit, if you owned all the stock in the world, you have destroyed the stock market.

Because ultimately, stock market is about speculating the future potential of the business and pricing it into today's stock price and more importantly having someone believe that and be available to buy from you at that price. So, it is a sophisticated collective story-telling-belief-system based on imperfect and asymmetric information using fancy mind-bending jargons. By having some regulatory safeguards, it is lent an air of legitimacy but really only the crudest of scamsters are stopped.

What are you on about? If you own all the shares of a company, you own the company, that's how hostile takeovers can happen. Usually shares come with voting rights, dividends (share of profits) etc. You're right about the price speculation though.

> Also, in the limit, if you owned all the stock in the world, you have destroyed the stock market

Dead wrong, and indeed that is the difference to crypto.

If you own all Bitcoins in the world, it is worth nothing and your net worth is zero. If you own all stocks in the world, you can direct all of those public companies to pay a large chunk of their profit to you every month in dividends, and make those companies do whatever you want them to do (research a way to build a Mars colony, or build better fusion reactors or pay off politicians to do your bidding), which is real power and real wealth.

You are missing the emphasis on the market in stock market. By buying all the stocks of a company, you are basically taking company private – you own the company but the market for its stock is gone – and the value of what you own is the book-value of the business and access to its free cashflow. You don't own an instrument that gets you multiples on that anymore. Stock market gives you a multiple on the book value.

For example, if Elon Musk owned all of Tesla he would have access to $3.7B of its annual free cash-flow or $3.3B of net income. He won't be able to afford to buy Twitter with that. But because he has Tesla stocks which gets a huge multiple on those metrics, he can pledge a fraction of his fraction of ownership in Tesla to get a huge loan with which he is able to buy Twitter (and still enjoy his ownership rights of Tesla stocks!). That's because of stock market.

> Owning a stock means owning a piece of a business

That is clearly not true. What you own, is something worth X amount of Y, where Y is what other believe it is worth.

"Means of production" has a very specific meaning and what you're saying is not it.

Actually, it is true.

When you buy a share in a company, you own a slice of that company. You have voting rights, access to shareholder meetings, annual reports, bod meetings etc.

What that share is worth is what others perceive it's value. what it's market "worth" is completely irrelevant to the fact you own a share.

You own voting rights, that's it. The recent Twitter stuff emphasized this. Some people were wondering why they can't just refuse to sell their stock (if the deal passes the various requirements, which includes a shareholder vote) if they don't want to. The reason is because they don't actually own anything, just a vote. If the company as a whole decides to go become a new entity (going from public to private in this case), the entity you owned a vote in no longer exists.

In an increasingly large number of companies even this notion of a vote is a facade. For instance at Facebook and Google, Zuckerberg and Larry/Sergey would maintain majority control even if you bought all the stock on the open market, because of stock tiering. So when you buy stock in these companies you're practically not even buying a vote. I mean you technically are, but it's like participating in an election of with 100 other people, where one guy gets a vote that magically counts as 101 votes.

That why things like the occasional 'share holders look to force Zuckerberg out' type articles are 100% clickbait. Google and Facebook also even tried to force scenarios on shareholders where the real owners of the company were going to "sell" their shares without giving up control by introducing non-voting shares. These plans were only stopped thanks to the courts because they, of course, passed a shareholder vote. [1]

[1] - https://arstechnica.com/tech-policy/2017/09/shareholders-for...

Actually, the Twitter stuff emphasized just the opposite - even after the board agreed to the sale, a majority of shareholders (well, specifically, a majority of the voting power as determined by shares) still had to agree. And because they did, Musk is on track to own Twitter.

Facebook also demonstrates it - Zuckerberg and a few others (many of whom have given him voting power on their behalf) own 'Class B' stock, which is worth 10 votes (and thus could reasonably be treated as each share being worth 10 of Class A shares). What is sold to everyone else is 'Class A' stock worth 1 vote. Despite owning fewer stock shares, then, Zuckerberg has more votes and thus has effective majority control.

You mention due to stock tiering, but that's just it, those tiers don't remove votes, or even owning a share of the company (your stock still does), it just ensures that majority control stays in the company's control. It doesn't change the claim that stock shares = shares in the company. It just changes the percentage each stock is of the company, so it's not as simple as 1 stock = 1/(# of outstanding shares) control, but it still is (100% stock) = (100% control), and (X% of voting power from stock) = (X% of control).

> Zuckerberg and a few others (many of whom have given him voting power on their behalf) own 'Class B' stock, which is worth 10 votes (and thus could reasonably be treated as each share being worth 10 of Class A shares).

the stock exchanges really missed a trick by not prohibiting this sort of bullshit

It's not really that different than just issuing 11x class B stock, and sitting on 10x, except that it looks like Zuck has less control than he actually does.

Yeah - any corporate takeover is via stock acquisition. That's how Musk is buying Twitter; he's buying all the outstanding stock. "A share" of stock is literally "a share" of the company.

Branching off, what I feel is more important is that in brokers like Robinhood you don't even OWN the underlying security of your investment; you're renting it. Not even that... you're being lied to about owning it.

What are you talking about?

In the US stock ownership is ... complicated. Effectively all shares in all public companies are owned by the Depository Trust & Clearing Corporation[1].

When you buy a share of a company, you hold that share at a broker. That broker in turn uses a clearing company which then in turn moves shares around between accounts at DTCC on a net basis between brokers. The only company in this chain that knows what shares you own is your broker. To everyone else in the world your share is held by, for example, Fidelity or Vanguard.

You retain every economic right to the share, you just don't _technically_ own it. This gets more complicated with margin accounts, where as part of the margin agreement you agree to allow your broker to lend your shares to shorts, so for some periods of time you may not actually own the shares you think you own.

[1]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Depository_Trust_%26_Clearing_...

That doesn’t sound right.

The obvious example being a hostile take over. One can literally buy up more of a company than anyone else and then attention to take control of the company. One defence being too literally discount shares for existing owners so they can buy up more of the company.

We just saw this happen with Twitter.

Relevant XKCD - https://xkcd.com/927