Comment by lenerdenator

I forgot about that. Fair point.

Though the ownership of most large publicly traded companies more-or-less follows the same pattern. You have:

* the people who got in on the ground floor (typically executives) who are given stock options as their compensation, who have a plurality of the shares. Maybe majority holders, maybe not.

* institutional investors who typically use shares to back retirement accounts, whether they be acting for individuals or larger clients like pension funds

* retail bag holde... I mean... retail investors.

This also holds for Microsoft.