Would you dare trust in the wisdom of the market?

[Aimless]

http://www.wired.com/business/2013/03/ipo-man/

EXCERPT

"On January 26, 2008, a 30-year-old part-time entrepreneur named Mike Merrill decided to sell himself on the open market. He divided himself into 100,000 shares and set an initial public offering price of $1 a share. Each share would earn a potential return on profits he made outside of his day job as a customer service rep at a small Portland, Oregon, software company. Over the next 10 days, 12 of his friends and acquaintances bought 929 shares, and Merrill ended up with a handful of extra cash. He kept the remaining 99.1 percent of himself but promised that his shares would be nonvoting: He’d let his new stockholders decide what he should do with his life."

[Veldan Rath]

He's the majority owner, why would he let them decide?

[wiggin]

Nothing new, read the Unincorporated Man. It can work but it also has all sorts of problems.

[Dreadnaught]

I once gave someone money to help him pay to finalize his citizenship. I still joke that I'm entitled to 1% of his lifetime earnings, but...

Holy cow, this thing got sadder and sadder.

But some shareholders had other ideas. One anonymous investor sent Merrill on a date with a polyamorous woman. “She is currently seeing someone, but she has permission to date,” he wrote in his after-action report. “I’m of mixed feeling about that, but I recognize that this is a decision for the shareholders to make.” They decided against continuing the relationship but gave a 97 percent approval rating to a guy referred to as Jordon California. Feeling the weight of investor expectations, Merrill spent a drunken night “fooling around” with him. Like companies that stray from their core business to pursue an ill-advised acquisition (AOL/Time Warner, eBay/Skype), Merrill was slightly hung over the next morning—and only more convinced that Dixon was the one.