I tend to agree with you. To play devil's advocate, assume you are Google or Apple. You have (quite literally) 100 Billion dollars in cash equivalent securitie

I tend to agree with you. To play devil's advocate, assume you are Google or Apple. You have (quite literally) 100 Billion dollars in cash equivalent securities sitting around. You could do what amazon does and reinvest those into the business, but there is risk, and decreasing returns on that. Alternatively, you could just invest that money (in which case its not profit, so taxed differently, I believe), or you could pay your employees more. Those second two are, in the long run, potentially worse for investors. Is that good or bad? Unclear. Is that even how the calculus works? Unclear. Is this line of reasoning obviously wrong? No.