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Yes, you supply the money to the business. That is the investment. That is what the owner is risking, their cash, their car, their home, all the things you have to be willing to tie as collateral back to the business.
The act of investment is purchasing (or exchanging) capital using cash or other assets.
A business may acquire funding from investment, but in such a case the investor is trading cash for equity, bonds, or some other investment asset representing the present or future value of the company, or generated by the company. The investor is not supplying capital, but rather purchasing capital (or trading capital).
The idea that the investor is supplying capital to the company is only a metaphor.
Someone may lose money from an investment, but most capital is owned by immensely wealthy individuals, whose situation is vastly removed from that of ordinary workers, who actually do face the risk of losing their only home or their only car.
Even small businesses are owned by individuals who have chosen to become business owners in order to profit from others' work. Any risk they assume is through an attempt to enrich themselves from gains not shared with workers. By not sharing their gains with those who are working to create them, business owners, large or small, are not helping workers, but rather preventing workers from advancing.
It isn't a metaphor. It is how it works.
The gains are shared with the workers; it is called a paycheck, insurance, etc.. The workers do not share the losses. When I had my first business, my house was at risk if I did not repay the loan. The worker lost nothing if it failed. They would just go on to the next job. When I gave them the company, they had as much knowledge as you did and bankrupted it in three months. They didn't get the basics of accounting or finance either.
You don't seem to grasp the basics. You seem to think the average business owner was given the company and has nothing at risk, which is purely mythical thinking. That is why our tax code heavily rewards people who own companies that create jobs. It is because they're taking a risk which rewards the community.
Even on a larger scale, if Twitter does not do well, Elon loses billions. The workers don't lose anything. If the company does well, the workers can gain millions in their stock grants.
It isn't the company preventing you from advancing. It is your mythical thinking of how things work. You are free to go start your own company and pay the workers their real value. Nothing stops you from doing that. You will be BK in very short order as you will have no reserves, if something breaks you will have no cash to repair it, you won't even be able to pay your PO at the end of the month but you are free to give it a swing.
If you chose to use your house as collateral in order for the opportunity to enrich yourself, then no one owes you any gratitude. You are not a hero. You acted in your own interests, not for helping others.
If workers provided labor, and you only paid them wages, then you profited from their labor, and prevented them from advancing by realizing the full value of their labor.
The only reason your house was at risk was because the bank hoards capital, using lending as a device to augment its own wealth.
If capital were shared by everyone, then all the problems you describe would not occur. No one would lose houses or cars, no one would be a tens of millions of times richer than anyone else, and everyone would be paid fully for their labor, without distinction of owner versus worker.
No, it meant I knew how to manage risk and run a business. When they took their full value, they ran it right into the ground.
Of course they wouldn't lose their house or car in your fantasy world. They never had one to start with. Communism has always provided a lower standard of living for the people living under it. There is reason they have to build walls to keep the people in.
You are not understanding.
The risk is artificial.
Those who have the most wealth, the most capital, are not facing risk, compared to everyone else. Someone who has $10 billion in assets and loses $2 billions has not lost in the same way as a poor person who loses a car. The billionaire is completely insulated from the precarity faced by most of the population, because the billionaire privately controls the vast wealth of society. The losses suffered by the billionaire owe to the instability of the business and the business cycle, not to the trials of life.
Those who are most wealthy face the least risk, and in fact impose the genuine risk on everyone else.
If control over capital were shared, then no one would be precarious, nor need to use a home as collateral for a loan.
No I understand just fine. Unless you want to cite something, stop saying I don't understand something when you clearly don't understand.
The risk is not artificial. That is one of the strangest things I have every heard. Small business is a large part of the economy.
There are 33.2 million small businesses in America, which combined account for 99.9% of all U.S. businesses. Small businesses are credited with just under two-thirds (63%) of the new jobs created from 1995 to 2021. In 2021, a record breaking 5.4 million new business applications were filed in the U.S.
You have some weird fascination with billionaires when the average company or employer is a small business that has nothing to do with billionaires.
The average person takes out a loan, uses their cash, put their car or home as collateral to start a business. These are not billionaires, and they're the heart of our economy. Yet you are babbling about billionaires which I am not nor are most people who run a company.
https://www.uschamber.com/small-business/state-of-small-business-now
You are being incredibly dishonest.
You mentioned Elon Musk.
I simply observed that most of the capital is owned by a tiny cohort of society. Small businesses, especially businesses worth approximately the same as a house, comprise a relatively small valuation of capital (which is not the same as the number of businesses, or the number of jobs).
There is no reason why economic activity needs to be tied to someone risking becoming homeless. Such a relationship is a consequence of the system, the way that wealth is hoarded by the few and made available to the rest only under conditions that serve the private interest of the wealthy. A different system would not need to carry the same feature.
No, it isn't. I just proved to you otherwise. Every day people fund most. That is how most companies get started and most companies are risky ventures. Most large corporations are heavily leveraged as well. People hear profit and they think the company is swimming in cash when they have billions in debt.
Now I agree it shouldn't be this hard to start a business. People should not have to risk all their savings, house, etc and that is something that could be easily solved. We need better incubator loans from the SBA. No collateral, no risk to your credit but heavily supervised. I would fully support that. I would like to see most of the megacorps fail and instead of a Starbucks on every corner, a small coffee co-op or a small co-op chain of restaurants.
I will take a wild swing but your best meal has never been at a McDonalds.
How did you prove that ownership of capital in terms of its valuation is not extremely heavily concentrated?
You only gave the statistics relating to the count of small business and jobs in them.
One business can be worth more than a thousand others.
I suggest you review statistics on wealth distribution in various countries. Learn how much wealth as a share of the total is owned by various cohorts, and investigate questions such as how many individuals own half the wealth.
Wealth distribution is something people who don't understand wealth bring up. Elon has a lot of wealth. That doesn't stop me from having lots of wealth.
People need to stop worrying about the billionaires and focus more on their own journey. I don't use reddit, facebook, Twitter or any of that crap. If everyone stopped using them, a lot of the billionaires would vanish since it's funny money.
Yes, the wealthy have more wealthy but that doesn't stop you from having wealth. This is about as far as I get into any social media platform as I don't want to give people like Zucker money.