4 ms·

Forest for the trees. The main point of the main article still holds true: Big Pharma (and Big Everything, really) consistently spends more on executive compen

• wang_li 3y ago
  Dividends are not spending. It’s just the shareholders taking money they own.
  • patrickthebold 3y ago
    Money they own because the profits of the company far exceed the R&D costs.
  • somenameforme 3y ago
    There's a pretty nice article on this topic here. [1] Shareholders do not own companies in any, way, shape or fashion, let alone owning the profits of a company. Shareholders own a right to vote on company matters and have certain privileges based around such, but increasingly often they don't even really own that in any meaningful way. Google, Facebook, and many other companies use tiered shares, where the executive owners of the company grant themselves shares with orders of magnitude greater voting power, generally enough for majority control. So the shares everybody else owns serve little purpose other than speculation. In any case this is a [somewhat interesting] red herring. The issue is that big pharma profits are already very large (and in fact COVID sent a number of big pharma execs into the billionaires club) and so public funding serves little purpose other than to further increase their profit margins, which should not be the purpose of public funding - even though in practice it often is. [1] - https://moneyweek.com/merryns-blog/shareholders-and-the-myth-of-company-ownership https://moneyweek.com/merryns-blog/shareholders-and-the-myth...