Subject: Re: Make Berkshire Compound Again!
Mungo:
Imagine, for example, that 20% of all Alphabet shares that ever existed owe their origin to options or stock granted to employees at some point in the past. In that case, any one of the shares of a traditional origin long ago would, absent that issuance, be worth 25% more today and could therefore be assumed to have a market price 25% higher today. (at the same market cap, of course). Those share grants and options were in lieu of more obvious cash, so you'd have to deduct what it would have cost in pure salary and bonuses to employ those same people. But I think it's fair to say that, in our hypothetical, that cash cost would have been vastly VASTLY less than 20% of the current market cap of Alphabet.

And then most importantly:

In this hypothetical, I think those people would have worked quite happily for far less than $899 billion in total salary.

It's lovely that you think that. That the smartest, most successful companies in the world are just randomly spending a trillion$ on an input they don't need to be spending it on. That the companies that are getting the most out of their employees could cut what they are paying those employees by a trillion$ without impacting either the quality or quantity of what they get from those employees.

It would be even more lovely, what with the way western rationality seems to work, if you had evidence for this.

Where are the google-like companies that have shown your belief to be true? The companies that got google-like results from their work force while paying them a trillion$ less than the google work force has been paid? Where are the companies that, at least in terms business value growth performance, have eaten Google's lunch because they didn't stupidly flush a trillion$ of the value of the company down the toilet which is Google's mindlessly stupid overpayment of its work force?

Why are not the best performing companies in the world just like Google... EXCEPT without a form of wasteful stupidity, amounting to a one trillion$ stupidity tax on their business value?

So really, to distill my question to you:
You seem to believe that Google et al. are overpaying their work force by a material amount, even as there exists no Google-prime that does what Google does EXCEPT skips the material overpayment.

Would you classify your belief as rational?

R: