deerman essayist;

A trend I've seen in some Hazbin Hotel fanfiction that mildly annoys me:

Look at me. Look me in the eye. Listen to what I am saying.

If the economic structure of Hell is anything like the modern day United States--which it appears to be, probably for capitalism-is-Hell related reasons--there is no way anyone would be able to read or hear about VoxTek's current stock price on the news.

Stock prices on a day-to-day basis (public or otherwise) are only available for publicly traded companies, and there is no way in Hell Vox would ever make VoxTek publicly traded because then there would be disclosure requirements about the operations of VoxTek that would be publicly available, which would mean everyone could figure out where the money is going. There are ways to still disguise the money, but no disguise is necessary for a private company because then only the (usually very limited) number of investors have any information rights, and even those could be limited. If Vox needed outside capital, he could get it from like three people; he doesn't need the public weighing in on how he runs his goddamned business.

For privately held companies, not only are stock prices private, but also they do not vary on a day-to-day basis, because private companies only reassess stock price annually or when there is a precipitating event that would reasonably cause the value of the company to change (e.g., a financing round, acquisition of a major customer, etc.). If something went publicly wrong for VoxTek, Vox wouldn't be thinking about the stock price, he would be thinking about how his major investors would be pissed off (or, if he never needed outside funding, about how this is going to hit his revenue numbers or profit margin).

Furthermore, stop mentioning VoxTek having a board like it's an autonomous entity separate from Vox. If VoxTek has a board (which is only a given if it's a corporation and not a member-managed limited liability company or something), Vox, as VoxTek's founder, would certainly be on it (as well as being VoxTek's CEO), and if VoxTek didn't have any outside investors, would either be the only member (with perhaps a few advisors to the board who were not board members in of themselves, for advice-giving purposes) or the other members would be persons closely aligned with Vox that Vox--as the largest equityholder of VoxTek and very likely the only equityholder with material voting rights (with all other equityholders being service providers of VoxTek who have been granted vesting equity as part of their compensation package as an incentive measure)--would have the ability to remove and replace at his convenience. Companies don't grow boards like weeds; people become board members for a company because they run/started the company (and probably own a lot of founder equity in it), because they own a lot of the company (and got a board seat as part of negotiations for investing in the company) and want to make sure it doesn't run itself into the ground, and/or because they have some valuable expertise that the former two categories have agreed is worth weighing in to major board decisions.

Like firing the CEO, which they did. Technically, I mean they didn’t vote on it but it is hell so this counts as a vote right?

ft. @itsallalldeadair