All Employees Should Receive Stock Awards

Billionaire Mark Cuban believes stock options shouldn’t be reserved for the C-suite and that “all employees” should have a stake in their company’s success.

On Sunday, Cuban wrote in a post on X that the reason billionaire wealth has increased by $33 trillion since 2015, according to an Oxfam report published in June, is because “the stock market has gone straight up.”

“You know who is funding the increase, particularly lately? Retail investors. 401ks,” Cuban wrote on X. “The better question is, why are we not giving incentives to companies to require them to give shares in their companies to all employees, at the same percentage of cash earnings as the CEO?”

Cuban is advocating for a system where stock awards are given as the same percentage of salary across the company — if a CEO receives a stock award worth 100% of their salary, then every employee across the company would also get stock options equal to 100% of their own pay.

Several tech giants, including Apple, Salesforce, Adobe, and Tesla, already allow their employees to purchase stock at a discount. However, these companies have limits on how much employees can contribute — and executives still receive a higher percentage of shares relative to their salaries.

For example, Apple allows employees to purchase stock at a 15% discount. Staff can contribute up to 10% of their salary or a maximum of $21,250 per year.

Meanwhile, nearly 78% of Apple CEO Tim Cook’s pay last year came from stock awards. Stock contributed $58.1 million to Cook’s $74.6 million overall pay in 2024, making him the fifth-highest-paid CEO in the United States.

According to JPMorgan Workplace Solutions, giving employees stock options carries the benefit of workers performing with an owner’s mindset because they have a stake in the company. Stock options could also improve employee morale if the company does well.

Cuban has long argued that companies should give employees stock options. In 2020, Cuban said on the “This is Working” podcast that businesses will “get more from your employees, and they will be more committed if you share equity immediately in a meaningful way, so that everybody rises.”

Cuban also has a track record of sharing the wealth with his employees, though usually through cash bonuses rather than traditional stock options.

“In every business I’ve sold, I’ve paid out bonuses to every employee there more than a year,” Cuban wrote in a post on X last year.

When he sold his first company, a software firm called MicroSolutions, to CompuServe for $6 million in 1990, Cuban took 20% of the total sale price and paid it out to his 80 employees, giving them each a bonus of $15,000.

Later, when Cuban sold his streaming business, Broadcast.com, to Yahoo in 1999 for $5.7 billion, over 90% of the company’s staff became millionaires due to bonuses.

Cuban was worth $9.1 billion at the time of writing, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index.

Billionaire Mark Cuban believes stock options shouldn’t be reserved for the C-suite and that “all employees” should have a stake in their company’s success.

On Sunday, Cuban wrote in a post on X that the reason billionaire wealth has increased by $33 trillion since 2015, according to an Oxfam report published in June, is because “the stock market has gone straight up.”

“You know who is funding the increase, particularly lately? Retail investors. 401ks,” Cuban wrote on X. “The better question is, why are we not giving incentives to companies to require them to give shares in their companies to all employees, at the same percentage of cash earnings as the CEO?”