So is Uber, since this year. My point is, all of these companies ran hundreds of millions of dollars in the red for years before turning a profit.

Before they went public, who was foolish enough to invest in a company that has never turned a profit?

You’d be surprised. The basic strategy of losing money hand over fist for years to grow yourself to as large a user base as possible, before finally aggressively monetizing that user base, is well established in silicon valley. Investors would not even raise an eyebrow at the loss numbers posted by Reddit because of how exceedingly common that is.

And it has worked several times, making some people ridiculously wealthy. Good examples are Amazon, Facebook, and Uber. So usually companies on this level have raised hundreds of millions to sometimes billions of dollars in investment capital, allowing them to operate at these levels of losses for years at a time.

Because you’re exchanging stock worth $193 million for an equivalent amount of dollars, there’s technically no profit or loss involved in the transaction. In the same manner, when paying stock as a compensation, you secure services valued at $193 million for an amount of shares worth the same: the transaction is entirely equal. So you don’t make or lose any money by paying in stock.

Of course, the trick is that the value of the CEO’s work for one year can be whatever he says. If your claim is that they could have gotten more value out of the stock had they sold it in the IPO, I think you are absolutely correct in that regard.

Does that not mean that reddit would have made a 113 Million profit before his $193 million compensation package?

No. His normal salary is around 300k a year. This $193 million figure was the presumed valuation of a stock/options package he received ahead of the IPO. It doesn’t cost the company anything to pay him in stock, so it doesn’t affect the profit/loss calculation.

It’s much more efficient in this case to do a bi-elliptic transfer: raise apoapsis very far out, then lower your periapsis once you are at apoapsis. Wikipedia says you could do it with about 8.8 km/s delta v. Versus 24 or so for a basic Hohman transfer (still a bit better than 30)

Sadly the bi-elliptic transfer requires two burns so you can’t do it with a kick.

The general argument for getting rid of minimum wage is that there is a whole bunch of work out there which is simply not valuable enough to be profitable if the labour must be paid at minimum wage prices, and so those jobs simply aren’t available right now.

The trade-off is that it guarantees laborers are able to afford a basic life with their jobs, which greatly reduces the ability of capitalists to prey on the working class. However with UBI that problem isn’t so big anymore, so there’s theoretically no need for a minimum wage.