Mark Cuban: fight inequality by giving all workers company stock | Hacker News Reader

Mark Cuban: fight inequality by giving all workers company stock

fortune.com

46 points01-_-29 comments

It would improve equity, sure, but a potentially larger impact would be that when "increasing value for shareholders" the shareholders in question are also the employees. It's a lot easier winning a fight against short-term profit taking when a significant portion of the shareholders are figuratively and literally invested in making long-term choices.

Is that something that happens?

I’ve owned company stock and I’ve never noticed a situation where the employees owned enough to make a difference in how the company operates.

The only exception being a company designed to be employee owned…

I think the idea is that all companies should be designed to be employee owned for at least a significant part.

That seems like a very Cuban "do as I say" kinda thing without much thought to it.

I don't think this solves anything regarding proportionality of how the economic development is distributed.

It has to be proportional to the amount of contribution poeple are doing instead of being proportional to how much already they have. Or at least the slider needs to be moved toward that direction.

So wages need to be higher (taxed less) and wealth should be taxed to force asset prices down. Giving people stock obviosly does none of these things. It ties wealth more to assets (stocks) so it will make stock (asset) prices higher which means working people will get poorer compared to richer people.

It should be possible to do a decrease in wage (concrete income) tax by putting a tax on wealth in a resonable way. This can also be balanced for older people by boosting pension payment in a way so they don't get overly effected by this in case they have all their money on their home.

He’s promoting a way to actually implement trickle down economics. Though I would argue it would probably be better for those workers if the company stock they would be given was sold and that money was converted into a pension fund that was required to maintain a diverse investment portfolio.

Both trickle down, right?

He's rediscovered employee-owned co-ops but to a lesser degree.

So when the company has trouble the employees are potentially out of a job and their stock drops?

This seems like an eggs in one basket situation.

To limit inequality, cap the CEO's total compensation to 100x (or whatever) the lowest-paid workers' compensation.

Google says: "at the 100 publicly traded U.S. companies with the lowest median worker pay, this ratio (CEO to worker pay) is much higher, averaging 632 to 1.

Also: "From 1978 to 2024, inflation-adjusted CEO pay grew over 1,094%, while typical worker compensation increased by only 26%"

ESOPs have minted many a paper millionaire. I work for one and it’s a retirement vehicle that’s been often, but not always, outperforming the S&P in our case.

We get ESOP shares as well as 401K match; double the retirement.

This sounds an awful lot like https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Company_scrip, which has been illegal for a long time and for good reason.

If the stock can be sold for legal currency it is nothing at all like company script.

Company scrip was company currency and employees were required to be paid in it and could only be used in company stores. Employee stock is getting some of your pay, voluntarily, in stock which can be sold in market. As long as company doesn't own housing or run grocery store, it isn't scrip.

Works in Mondragon.

Mark Cuban just reinvented co-ops. Even better; how about Workers take control of the economy instead of having a couple oligarchs run the whole show?

good on cuban, a good start. but we're still going to need that UBI.

The mechanics of implementing UBI is relatively straightforward. Have the Fed buy up securities, ban stock buybacks to force dividends, issue FedAccounts to everyone entitled to a government backed deposit account, payments land in the account either monthly or bi weekly as an option. Tada. UBI. Just like social security payments, but funded by the profits of all concerns required to issue stock to enable some portion of their gains to be redistributed to the citizen population. It’s simply a corporate tax, just a different implementation.

Will it ever get done? I wouldn’t hold my breath. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

As another comment in this thread says, just push wages up. That’s a short term fix that would pay off immediately for workers broadly.

Tripling US union membership would shift $1.2T to workers annually - https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2026/jul/15/union-member... - July 15th, 2026

The case for tripling union membership - https://www.epi.org/publication/the-case-for-tripling-union-... - July 15th, 2026

...and goods produced overseas would need to be heavily tariffed. But that was roundly criticized so where does that leave us?

There are items which the US cannot produce domestically where imports are unavoidable. Think coffee, for example. Someone smarter than I needs to figure out how to manage such trade deficits and surplus in this context. But the US can easily produce clean energy and mobility domestically at scale [1] (solar, wind, batteries, electric vehicles etc), it simply chooses not to. China builds lights out, automated robotic manufacturing, the US should too, considering population decline (leading to persistent labor shortages) [2] long into the future.

Manufacturing in the US has increased due to tariffs, but not manufacturing jobs [3] [4] [5]. Unionize all jobs, that's the point and how to get to living wages and better working conditions, because while some jobs can be outsourced, most on US soil cannot be.

[1] Ember Energy: China Cleantech Exports Data Explorer - https://ember-energy.org/data/china-cleantech-exports-data-e... (updated monthly)

[2] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=47680794 (citations)

[3] US manufacturing jobs fall at fastest rate since the pandemic - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48647324 - June 2026 (2 comments)

[4] The manufacturing sector is growing, but isn't adding jobs - https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/06/01/the-manufacturi... - June 1st, 2026

> “(They’re saying) we’re not being allowed to backfill people that are leaving, and it’s getting really, really hard for those remaining,” she said.

> The uptick in manufacturing is at least good for workers’ paychecks, but not so great for those looking to get hired, said labor economist Alí Bustamante at the University of New Orleans.

> “We’re seeing a jobless manufacturing rebound,” Bustamante said. “A lot of firms, they’re investing more in machines, more in overtime, expanding shifts. And we are probably going to see that in higher productivity per worker.”

> Remember, Trump’s tariffs were supposed to give domestic producers a competitive edge — leading to reshoring and more manufacturing jobs. Bustamante said that hasn’t happened.

> “The first year and a half of these tariffs during the second Trump administration, we can say pretty unequivocally there hasn’t been an employment rebound in manufacturing,” he said.

[5] A check-in on manufacturing jobs, one year since Trump's tariffs - https://www.marketplace.org/story/2026/04/01/how-trumps-tari... - April 1st, 2026

(if you are beholden to the benevolence of companies to improve worker wages or conditions, you are going to be very sad; they will maximize for profits and productivity, whenever possible)

"More jobs" and "more productivity" are more-or-less opposite goals under capitalism.

Strongly agree. The TLDR is labor needs more power as soon as possible (think in QALYs), and capitalism has to be nerfed (which can take time, election cycles, and broad electorate turnover), if we want workers to have better lives and to fix wealth inequality in some capacity. Capitalism itself need not be eliminated, but the measure has become the target, with predictable suboptimal outcomes.

So, workers must unionize, where they can, as soon as possible while we work the kinks out of a socioeconomic system operating suboptimally. Otherwise, with all due respect, they’re fucked against paperclip maximizers whose focus is some combination of line go up, profits, and control over workers that enable said profits.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality-adjusted_life_year

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Goodhart%27s_law

(I’m hopeful with rapid gains Democratic Socialists have been making recently, but there are decades of work ahead imho; think in systems)

I don't know if the criticism was of the notion of tariffs. Instead it was of the bone headed implementation by the Trump administration, where tariffs were not well thought out(we tariffed islands of penguins, but specifically exempted Russia and Belarus), and were not coupled with industrial and fiscal policy to encourage domestic manufacturing to catch up.

> Will it ever get done? I wouldn’t hold my breath. “It’s easier to imagine the end of the world than the end of capitalism.”

Well except that Mark Cuban is out here proposing the first steps towards the end of capitalism, namely collective worker ownership of the means of production, so I think that rather than quote Mark Fisher all over again, we have to understand why today's capitalist class are suddenly proving rhetorically amenable to certain steps towards socialism.

UBI's have been tried repeatedly and have never worked. They have a bad incentive structure and are simply unaffordable. Unfortunately if you want money you will have to get a job

I just did some brief research on this using Perplexity. I’m failing to see how partial pilots of basic income “didn’t work”, what exactly do you mean by that?

Nobody can agree how big UBI should be, and people talk past each other. Small UBI, like poverty level, could replace welfare but wouldn't be enough to survive on without doing something about housing and healthcare. Big UBI would be enough for good life, like median income, but not affordable with current economy and create inflation.

There is something in between that would be enough to survive, with small UBI, universal healthcare, and guaranteed housing.

You've got to start somewhere. Even a small UBI, like the one Alaska has, is better than nothing. Replacing welfare with a UBI at the same level would already be a massive improvement because you'd get rid of the poverty trap. From there you can grow it as much as the economy demands.

Mincome: https://humanrights.ca/story/manitobas-mincome-experiment

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