I appreciate your reasoned and detailed response. I disagree with you and I'll take it point by point. In some cases I think the disagreement is based more in a [reasonable] misunderstanding of the point I'm actually making, or where I didn't make my point as clearly as I should have.
> Information imbalance
I have been that Director level manager responsible for scaling and hiring with out the full scope of information. When I said "people responsible" I mean, the people with the information. And yes, it is a smaller pool than many people might thing. But it is also a much more highly compensated pool. Those are the people who are ultimately responsible, and the people who should face consequences and accountability. I would include the investors (at the very least those who sit on the board and take an active role in the running of the organization) in that pool.
> There's no physical machine the company is adding
Here I fumbled my words. I should have said "capital" or the "investors". Yes, absolutely, the organization itself provides value. But that organization is almost entirely composed of workers and could be run entirely by the workers with out capital. Traditionally, in a factory setting, the value capital has been said to provide - and the reasoning for capital taking the returns - is the physical machinery necessary for workers to do their work. In a tech company, there is no such machinery.
The organization of a tech company is entirely composed of, and run by, workers. In the vast majority of cases, they don't need any physical machinery to do their work except for consumer grade electronics they probably already own or could trivially acquire. In the case of a fully distributed company, this is even more true.
NOTE: I am including management in the workers here. I'm using workers, as it is used in the context of worker cooperatives or employee owned business, as a synonym of employees. This is different from the traditional union or labor organizing context which separates "line workers" from "managers".
> Tech workers are still underpaid
In a traditional capitalist labor market, I think you can reasonably make this argument. This views workers as replaceable cogs and looks at how cheaply they could be purchased on the market.
But I'm looking at it from the perspective of "what does it actually take to produce the value the company produces". And all it takes is the workers time, skills, and knowledge. As I made in other points, capital brings very little to the table. In that case, the workers produce the entire value of the company. And from that perspective, many workers at tech companies (which, remember, I'm using as a synonym for "employee" here) are still compensated less than the value they create. In some cases by significant amounts.
> Paper losses are not true losses and you can just wait for the price to go back up
I'll grant you the wait for them to go back up point. That was a bit glib and not well formed, but also somewhat tangential to my larger point which I didn't make very clearly: which is that while those losses might hurt on paper if they represent wealth that is on paper then they have no immediate economic impact on the person losing it. There's no risk of hunger from a paper loss. No risk of homelessness. No risk of exposure to the elements.
And I will grant you, yes, there are some investors who do expose themselves that much with their investments. But they are a tiny outlier. For the vast majority of investors, their investment is surplus far above and beyond what they need to live a comfortable life to a reasonable standard of living. In other words, they can afford to lose it while suffering no unreasonable impact to their quality of life. (Note, I would consider going from "can afford a private yatch" to "have to live an upper middle class life" a reasonable impact.")
To your point about institutional investors, the vast majority of those assets (80 - 90%) are owned by the top 10%. Who are, by definition, the middle upper class and above. They are perfectly comfortable. And they can afford a loss.
My larger point is about the risk actually being taken - not in terms of paper wealth - but in terms of real impact on quality of life. Investors aren't taking much. Workers are.