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Technology Stocks : Intel Corporation (INTC) -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Stock Farmer who wrote (174660)	5/20/2003 1:27:36 PM
From: Don Lloyd	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 186894

John, Are stock options a cost, or not? This is an incomplete question without a point of reference. Without a doubt, they are not a cost to my father, for example. If we limit the scope of the possibilities to only honest disagreements, there are only two possibilities -- 1. Stock options are a cost to the company AND to its shareholders. (This possibility can have its own variations as to whether the cost to shareholders is the result of a fixed allocation of a company cost, or a variable allocation of a fixed company value, or a combination of both.) 2. Stock options are a cost to ONLY the shareholders. No one worth paying any attention to claims that shareholders do not experience at least a potential impact. Going way back to basics, consider the following -- Every Friday, the company passes out an opaque envelope to each of its employees as they leave. All that is known before opening the envelope is that there is some kind of paper or paper-like item inside. It could be paper money, a company check, US Bonds, company stock, company options, another company's stock, Red Sox tickets, a Xerox of a newspaper photo showing the previous company president with his prison ID number, a rare postage stamp, or anything else. Some of these things represent expenses to the company and some do not. It is an open question as to what general set of rules could be applied to the contents of each envelope to distinguish one from the other. Assume that some such set of rules could be established. Now increase the possibilities. Instead of limiting the distribution of the envelopes to just employees, give some of the envelopes to non-employee stockholders and random people walking by. Does this potentially affect whether a specific envelope's contents are a company expense or not? Regards, Don