Would you agree at least that the founders and initial employees took on the most risk and did the bulk of the heavy lift to get the company to that place? EG does the proverbial guy who ran the company out of his garage for 5 years funding it on his credit card deserve outsized reward for the risk and work he put in?
Yes, but the way shares work is that someone paid either the original founders or the company itself for a share, then someone paid that person, and so on. The current shareholders are certainly profiting, but they exist only because the company needed them to exist in order to create the company as it is now.
