Yes, I’m no longer spending all of my time working for faceless shareholders I’ll probably never meet…
This is because I now own 36 shares (strictly 36 shares worth of RSUs) in the company I work for, so some of the time I spend working is for a faceful shareholder I see in the mirror every morning.
So exactly how much do I own? Well, according to the NYSE listing for IBM, there are a total of 1,377,955,000 shares. Divide 36 by that and it’ll tell you that I own 26.1 billionths of the company.
That’s not a number I can easily comprehend. So let’s try and get something I can get a better handle on.
If we assume that I get that proportion of everyone’s working year, and everyone does the same amount of work as me, how much work is mine? I’m paid for 7 hours 24 minutes a day, 260 days a year, which is 6,926,400 seconds. I reckon that means I own 181 milliseconds of IBM’s work per year.
I can almost comprehend that; after all there are shorter periods of time which crop up occasionally in my life – the 80 milliseconds takes to change gear in a 2007 F1 car for instance. But it’s not an everyday thing.
So what if I let everyone else off and only claim my own time back – how much do I own then? Fairly obviously we just multiply the last number by the number of employees IBM has, which is roughly 300,000.
That comes out at 2 days, 16 minutes and 47 seconds of my work for the year. Finally, a readily comprehensible number!
