How does the board "give" him stock? Isn't all of the stock owned by individuals? The board are a bunch of high-tier investors right?
Isn’t all of the stock owned by individuals?
Not usually. A company can issue stock, but never sell it. This is called "Treasury Stock". Further if the company doesn't have any Treasury Stock, they can choose to issue new rounds of stock diluting the per share value of existing shares. The good reasons to do this is to raise capital needed for new investments by the company. Alternatively the company could issue a "stock split" which creates double amount of shares as a way to intentionally cut the value per share in half (doubling the amount of share in the company).
However, none of these are a good thing to do for an employee (Musk) because they sold too much of their own pile of stock to buy a failing social media company.
How does the board "give" him stock? Isn't all of the stock owned by individuals? The board are a bunch of high-tier investors right?
Not usually. A company can issue stock, but never sell it. This is called "Treasury Stock". Further if the company doesn't have any Treasury Stock, they can choose to issue new rounds of stock diluting the per share value of existing shares. The good reasons to do this is to raise capital needed for new investments by the company. Alternatively the company could issue a "stock split" which creates double amount of shares as a way to intentionally cut the value per share in half (doubling the amount of share in the company).
However, none of these are a good thing to do for an employee (Musk) because they sold too much of their own pile of stock to buy a failing social media company.