The HL3 memes don't even seem fair to use anymore. I don't even want to un-seriously make joke fun of them at this point. They are just genuinely doing so much for the community.
But overall Valve just seems straightforwardly less shitty towards the consumer than other major companies in their space, by a long shot.
LLM summary: "Steward-ownership is a model where a company’s control stays with long-term stewards (founders, employees, or a mission-aligned foundation) while profits are limited and the company cannot be sold for private gain. The goal is to protect the mission permanently."
The key, if I understand properly, is that these company cannot be sold (not even by the founders), so there is no "shareholder value" per se to maximize. It is also probably not a good way for founders to maximize their net worth, which is probably why it's not more popular...
If the company makes a profit and there aren't shareholders there to keep the stewards in check, excesses can and do develop.
I don't think he'll deliver and I think it's based on fantasy economics, he's been really losing it recently, but as a deal it's not entirely irrational if he could make it happen.
This particular CEO is on the more influential end of the spectrum, but I think executives generally get too much credit for outcomes. If this does happen, it won’t just be because of the CEO, but also because of ~100,000 other employees. Their contribution might be smaller, but comparing compensation, I don’t think it’s proportionally smaller.
It's about leverage. It's all about where you stand and how long your lever is. Musk stands at the top and he has a very long set of levers. He's also much more closely personally involved in engineering aspects of a company that most CEOs know little to nothing about. Sometimes that's good, sometimes it's bad, because his decisions have massively outsized effects because of this. Leverage.
If Musk makes good or bad decisions over the next few years, that matters much, much more than the decisions of anyone else at Tesla, especially because he hires and fires everyone else at Tesla. They're all only there, as individuals in particular, because of him anyway.
As it happens I think his decision making has deteriorated significantly recently, in some respects but not all. Also Tesla just doesn't have the magic special sauce SpaceX has had since they developed reusability. There's no special engineering insight in the Tesla architecture. Other vehicle manufacturers already caught up. That catch up is happening in space tech as well with BO's recent booster recovery, but SpaceX still has a very significant lead there, based on a truly revolutionary concept (which Musk championed personally) that they had exclusively for 10 years. Starship still doesn't work though, so we'll see.
I agree that the CEO is typically the most important in this respect, especially this particular CEO. I just think that giving him an additional 1/8th of the company's entire market cap growth, on top of the roughly 1/8th he already has, is highly disproportionate.
Clearly the shareholders disagree, and that's entirely their right. And I'm not surprised, CEOs are greatly overvalued in general.