If a startup can always issue new shares, what value is there to stocks/options?
The short answer, probably not much.  Unless you have a controlling interest in the company.  If at least 50%+1 of the shareholder votes are in favor of the dilution then it can be done.  There are some SEC rules that should protect against corporate looting and theft like what the Severin side is trying to make it appear as happened. However it would appear that Severin did something stupid.  He signed away all of his voting right to someone who would use them to make his rights basically worthless.  Had he kept his head in the game he could probably have saved himself.  But he didn't. If your average startup started issuing lots of stock and devaluing existing shares significantly then I would expect it would be harder to find investors willing to watch as their investment dwindled.  But if you are issuing a limited amount stock to get leverage to grow bigger then it is worth it.  In the .com bubble there were quite a few companies that just issued stock to buy other companies.  Eventually most of these companies got delisted because they diluted them selves to much when they were overvalued. Any company not just a startup can dilute its shares.  Many if not most major companies issue stock to raise capital.  This capital is then generally used to build the business further and increase the value of all shares.  Most of the time this dilution is very minor (<.1%) and has little if any impact on the stock.  There are rules that have to be followed as listed companies are regulated by the SEC.  There are less regulations with private corporations.  It looks like the dilution was combined with the buyout of the Florida company which probably contributed to the legality of the dilution.     With options they are generally issued at a set price.  This may be higher or lower than the reported sell price of the stock when the option is issued.  The idea is over time the stock will increase in value so that those people who hold on to their options can buy the stock for the price listed on the option.  I worked at an ISP start up in the 90's that made it pretty well.  I left before the options were issued but I had friends still there that were issued an option at $16 a share the value of the stock at the time of the issue of the option was about 12.  Well the company diluted the shares and used them to acquire more ISP's unfortunately this was about the time that DSL And cable internet took off so the dial up market tanked.  The value eventually fell to .10 they did a reverse split and when they did the called in all options.  The options did not have a positive cash value at any time.  Had RMI ever made it big then the options could have been worth millions.  There are some people from MS and Yahoo that were in early that made millions off of their options.  This became a popular way for startups to attract great talent paying peanuts.  They invested their time in the business hoping to strike gold.  A lot of IT people got burned so this is less popular among top talent as the primary compensation anymore. "Companies normally do not give you X% of shares, but in effect give you a fixed ""N"" number of shares. The ""N"" may translate initially to X%, but this can go down. If say we began with 100 shares, A holding 50 shares and B holding 50 shares. As the startup grows, there is need for more money. Create 50 more shares and sell it at an arranged price to investor C. Now the percentage of each investor is 33.33%. The money that comes in will go to the company and not to A & B.   From here on, A & C together can decide to slowly cut out B by, for example: After any of the above the % of shares held by B would definitely go down." "It's called ""dilution"". Usually it is done to attract more investors, and yes - the existing share holders will get diluted and their share of ownership shrinks. As a shareholder you can affect the board decisions (depends on your stake of ownership), but usually you'll want to attract more investors to keep the company running, so not much you can do to avoid it. The initial investors/employees in a startup company are almost always diluted out. Look at what happened to Steve Jobs at Apple, as an example."
"Also note that a share of voting stock is a vote at the stockholder's meeting, whether it's dividend or non-dividend. That has value to the company and major stockholders in terms of protecting their own interests, and has value to anyone considering a takeover of the company or who otherwise wants to drive the company's policy. Similarly, if the company is bought out, the share will generally be replaced by shares in whatever the new owning company is. So it really does represent ""a slice of the company"" in several vary practical ways, and thus has fairly well-defined intrinsic value linked to the company's perceived value. If its price drops too low the company becomes more vulnerable to hostile takeover, which means the company itself will often be motivated to buy back shares to protect itself from that threat. One of the questions always asked when making an investment is whether you're looking for growth (are you hoping its intrinsic value will increase) or income (are you hoping it will pay you a premium for owning it). Non-dividend stocks are a pure growth bet. Dividend-paying stocks are typically a mixture of growth and income, at various trade-off points. What's right for you depends on your goals, timeframe, risk tolerance, and what else is already in your portfolio." Par value of common stock is essentially a historical artifact; it is a price at which the company will redeem shares directly.  If common stock has any par value at all, it is always so low that no one would ever redeem, preferring to sell in the market at a better price.  Par is obviously much more relevant to debt securities than equities. So you do need a strike price.  ljwobker's letter is a typical one, in that companies often make the strike price for granted options a formula based on the market price of the stock at the time of the grant, say 100% of market or 110% of market.  But you will obviously need to find out what strike your company is offering. "The implication is market irrationality is stronger than market rationality. Aka nothing makes sense when TSLA climbs to $400 or when CMG rises to $750.   I wouldn't say there is a systematic flaw in valuation. I think there is just a lot of ignorance. Markets are more open to household investors than ever before. You used to go to your broker and ask him what's up and he'd give you the inside scoop since you pay them money. Now you go onto marketwatch and get some random nobody's opinion on everything and make stock selections based on that.   But eventually the chickens come home to roost and things will correct itself. Big players will jump ship and cause signals to other traders to jump ship. The public can pump stocks up pretty high but it doesn't just go to infinity. Eventually someone will stop and say, ""wtf is going on"" and start selling. Stocks are sold on a basis of a limit order book so it's real prices that people are paying. People don't care about prices currently because most don't have any finance knowledge but want to invest their own money.  They just hear about Tesla doing something amazing (from some clickbait article or news outlet) and can't stop thinking about buying Tesla. They go to Chipotle and think ""wow this place is so good and hip, they must be a great investment"".   The markets have been filled with more subjective analysis than ever before especially with so much low quality information at your fingertips. Equally ignorant people startin blogs about investment and personal finance being shepherds for other ignorant people. In the end they all lose.  People who exclaim ""this stock is going up to $250 easily"" with literally zero quantitative analysis or even a baseline reference point to back it up are prime examples of this.   Ignorance of markets and cheap money almost always lead to market runs that end catastrophically. Dot com bubble, 1929 market crash, 2008, it's always the same. People who have no business taking loans out or buying on margin or leveraging positions with debt only to get fucked over once things are brought back down to Earth. After 2 runs of QE, we now have cheap money and with everyone being a crier for their personal investment strategy, we now also have rampant ignorance.   I don't expect things to last but no one can call the bottom or the top, or else you'd be very very rich. Have a safe portfolio, don't try to time the markets. Have a strategy that hedges against unexpected change, don't try to gamble on this change. Because it's ultimately impossible to predict the movement of every single person on this earth that invests their money into markets. So don't try. Just be prepared.   ----  To expand further into valuation theory:  at the end of the day, people invest their money to make more money.  It's as simple as that.  If your money doesn't grow in an investment vehicle, it's ultimately a shit investment.  But no one values intrinsic value of a company's equity before they decide whether or not $380 for TSLA is a good/bad deal.  As a result, stocks can be pumped up way higher and people still see the gains on their stocks through capital gains fueled by other optimistic investors.   Non-zero sum goes both ways.  People can make shitloads of money on stock without an equitable loser--people can also lose shitloads on stock without any real winner emerging from the rubble.  When this bubble bursts, lots and lots of people will lose money on TSLA when people's expectations become rational and they stop paying $300 a share for a negative or 70 PE ratio.  It's insane what multipliers people will pay for these companies without even realizing the implication--if you buy a share of a company with a PE ratio of 70, you just paid 70 times their earnings for a share.  In an ideal world where they released every single penny of earnings as dividends, it would take you 70 periods to reclaim your money on that share.  This obviously doesn't take into account capital gains, but capital gains aren't supposed to be this irrational to where a stock can be pumped up into 70x PE ratio in the first place.  It's a whole messed up web of confusion and irrationality and eventually something will catalyze a reaction.  Imagine a market where everyone just agreed to pump up a single stock to infinity and everyone just rakes in shitloads of money.  Would this work?  Of course not.  It's literally a pyramid scheme that relies on future generations to constantly inject capital--no real value is being created by this scheme.  It requires constantly more future generations to continue adding money into the scheme and will crash once people stop pumping money into it.  The same thing will happen here.  Everyone ""agreed"" to pump up TSLA (in a sense) but eventually people will realize this is stupid as shit and the pyramid will come tumbling down because there is nothing they receive from this scheme other than the money from other people.  It's essentially moving money around, making 0 use of it, until people stop pumping money into the system and everyone realizes that nothing of real value had been produced through the use of this money.  Ultimately the only thing that creates real value is the money that is returned to shareholders from an outside party--the company you're invested in.  Real value is not created when people exchange stock and money.  So why do these transactions create higher values in equity?  The basis of equity valuation states that dividends are the only way for companies to raise the price of their stock, going off the traditional Dividend Discount Model.  And theoretically, that's the only logical explanation.  Buying and trading stock does nothing for the company, minus T Stock they might own.  Ultimately the only party creating real value is the underlying company.  If they aren't creating real value, then their stock should not be increasing, period.  The way they create value is by efficiently utilizing assets to generate returns on investment which can be returned to investors through dividends.  Dividends can only be increased (while maintaining an equitable payout ratio) by generating more net income that can increase the actual pool of money that can be allocated back to investors.  TSLA does not do this.  TSLA regularly loses money and overpromises.  There is no logical explanation for any of this except that everyone is irrational.    Obviously theory is not the same as in practice but the theory is important here because it's really the basis for any investment at all.  At the end of the day, a share of stock is the right to a share of the company's equity.  People own equity in companies because companies generate money that it returns back to its owners.  That's what a company does.  That's what an owner does.  If you own shares of a company, you're an owner.  And if your company does not return more money back to you YoY, then why are you invested in them?    Ultimately, you're riding a capital gains wave that will eventually subside once market irrationality succumbs to rationality.  And it always does because the real value always catches up to the fake value that is caused by pumping and dumping stocks." If it helps you to think about it, long is equivalent to betting for the upside and short is equivalent to betting for the downside. If you are long on options, then you expect the value of such options to increase.  If you are long an option, then you own the option.  If you are short an option, then generally you sold the option.  Someone who is short a call (sometimes called the writer or occasionally the issuer) has sold a call option to someone who is now long a call. Buying a call option that will increase in value is itself a form of investment, just as it's investment to buy stock or other instruments hoping they will appreciate in value.  An option's value will rise or fall with the underlying, so being long an option is a way to be long in the underlying.  Someone can be long in a stock by buying the stock, or long in a call by buying call options in the stock.  The long call generally requires less initial investment than buying the underlying, and lets the option-holder avoid the asset downside during the option term.  The risk is that the asset may not appreciate to the point that the call option will pay off. In the conceptual sense, a share of stock is a particular right to the profits and assets of a corporation, both in form of dividends and in liquidation.  An option is a particular right to the the share of stock.  It's just a further way to formalize and subdivide the various property rights that exist in a corporation.  If you can buy a piece of paper with particular rights to corporate profits and assets, then you can buy another piece of paper with particular rights to the former piece of paper. A stock is only worth what someone is willing to pay for it. If it trades different values on different days, that means someone was willing to pay a higher price OR someone was willing to sell at a lower price.  There is no rule to prevent a stock from trading at $10 and then $100 the very next trade... or $1 the very next trade. (Though exchanges or regulators may halt trading, cancel trades, or impose limits on large price movements as they deem necessary, but this is beside the point I'm trying to illustrate). Asking what happens from the close of one day to the open of the next is like asking what happens from one trade to the next trade... someone simply decided to sell or pay a different price.  Nothing needs to have happened in between. Only on an accounting basis. The moment they start selling, it would plunge. Take a look at all the small float tech IPOs. Big pop, but once the lockup period ends, it drops 50% as insiders sell. In the end, fundamentals will rule. Facebook managed to unload a quarter of the company at the vastly inflated $38, which is very impressive. The other tech IPOs typically sell less than 10%, because selling more would lead to very low share prices. Remember, these guys are not retail investors selling 100 shares. The ticker shows the price of the last block of shares that was traded, but when someone tries to sell a couple million shares, then it will plunge. Selling stock means selling a portion of ownership in your company.  Any time you issue stock, you give up some control, unless you're issuing non-voting stock, and even non-voting stock owns a portion of the company. Thus, issuing (voting) shares means either the current shareholders reduce their proportion of owernship, or the company reissues stock it held back from a previous offering (in which case it no longer has that stock available to issue and thus has less ability to raise funds in the future).  From Investopedia, for exmaple: Secondary offerings in which new shares are underwritten and sold dilute the ownership position of stockholders who own shares that were issued in the IPO. Of course, sometimes a secondary offering is more akin to Mark Zuckerberg selling some shares of Facebook to allow him to diversify his holdings - the original owner(s) sell a portion of their holdings off.  That does not dilute the ownership stake of others, but does reduce their share of course. You also give up some rights to dividends etc., even if you issue non-voting stock; of course that is factored into the price presumably (either the actual dividend or the prospect of eventually getting a dividend).  And hopefully more growth leads to more dividends, though that's only true if the company can actually make good use of the incoming funds. That last part is somewhat important.  A company that has a good use for new funds should raise more funds, because it will turn those $100 to $150 or $200 for everyone, including the current owners.  But a company that doesn't have a particular use for more money would be wasting those funds, and probably not earning back that full value for everyone. The impact on stock price of course is also a major factor and not one to discount; even a company issuing non-voting stock has a fiduciary responsibility to act in the interest of those non-voting shareholders, and so should not excessively dilute their value. "A share of stock is a share of the underlying business. If one believes the underlying business will grow in value, then one would expect the stock price to increase commensurately. Participants in the stock market, in theory, assign value based on some combination of factors like capital assets, cash on hand, revenue, cash flow, profits, dividends paid, and a bunch of other things, including ""intangibles"" like customer loyalty. A dividend stream may be more important to one investor than another. But, essentially, non-dividend paying companies (and, thus, their shares) are expected by their owners to become more valuable over time, at which point they may be sold for a profit. EDIT TO ADD: Let's take an extremely simple example of company valuation: book value, or the sum of assets (capital, cash, etc) and liabilities (debt, etc). Suppose our company has a book value of $1M today, and has 1 million shares outstanding, and so each share is priced at $1. Now, suppose the company, over the next year, puts another $1M in the bank through its profitable operation. Now, the book value is $2/share. Suppose further that the stock price did not go up, so the market capitalization is still $1M, but the underlying asset is worth $2M. Some extremely rational market participant should then immediately use his $1M to buy up all the shares of the company for $1M and sell the underlying assets for their $2M value, for an instant profit of 100%. But this rarely happens, because the existing shareholders are also rational, can read the balance sheet, and refuse to sell their shares unless they get something a lot closer to $2--likely even more if they expect the company to keep getting bigger. In reality, the valuation of shares is obviously much more complicated, but this is the essence of it. This is how one makes money from growth (as opposed to income) stocks. You are correct that you get no income stream while you hold the asset. But you do get money from selling, eventually."