Companies have spent decades asking employees to “think like owners.” Mark Cuban has a fairly literal interpretation of that advice.
Earlier this summer, Cuban argued that companies should give equity to every employee: “Every company I’ve ever sold, I’ve given money to every single employee. Every time.”
Station Casinos apparently agrees.
Last week, the Las Vegas locals operator, whose publicly traded parent is Red Rock Resorts, surprised nearly 10,000 full- and part-time employees with more than $70 million in stock. Every employee on the payroll as of September 9 received $1,000 in Class A shares for each year of service, with distribution beginning September 14. The company’s longest-tenured worker, Ida Johnson, who joined in 1977, received $49,000. The award capped the company’s 50th anniversary celebration.
“When you walk out of here today, we want you to walk out differently than you walked in—not just as someone who works at Station Casinos, but as someone who owns a piece of it,” Vice Chairman Lorenzo Fertitta told a ballroom of employees.
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But the interesting part isn’t the $70 million. It’s the premise behind it.
Our employee sentiment score for Red Rock Resorts is 58.7, against 63.0 for the sector, and it has fallen another 2 points over the past year. Compensation is down 5.5 points, leadership 4.2, and willingness to recommend the company to a friend 5.1. The longer-term trend is clearer still: sentiment peaked at 66.8 in late 2022 and has declined since.
The one measure moving the other way? Positive business outlook, up 1.8 points.
That makes the stock award worth watching. Station Casinos didn’t give workers another slogan about ownership. It gave them ownership.
Timing is worth noting. The award came five days after Chief Justice John Roberts denied Red Rock’s request to pause an order requiring it to recognize and bargain with the Culinary Union while it sought Supreme Court review. The company’s labor dispute has itself involved allegations that employee benefits were used to discourage unionization, which Red Rock has disputed. Broad-based equity and union avoidance are not mutually exclusive motives.
There is evidence this matters beyond the headline. Fidelity’s 2026 survey of more than 25,000 stock-plan participants found that 43% became stock owners for the first time through their employer’s plan. And Kruse, Freeman and Blasi’s NBER working paper on shared capitalism, drawing on General Social Survey data and surveys of 14 companies running broad-based ownership programs, found that deeper participation in these programs was associated with higher job satisfaction, better treatment by supervisors, more training, higher pay and benefits, and greater job security. In the GSS sample, 45% of for-profit private sector employees reported participating in some form of shared capitalism.
Whether $70 million in stock changes how employees feel about the company is another question. Fortunately, that’s one we can measure.
Mandating AI Is the Easy Part
Last April, Shopify CEO Tobi Lütke issued what quickly became something of a corporate AI manifesto.
Using AI, he told employees, was now a “baseline expectation.” Teams asking for additional headcount would first have to demonstrate why they couldn’t get the work done with AI. AI usage would be considered in performance reviews.
Seventeen months later, Lütke has identified an unintended consequence: “slop grenades.”
Employees are using AI to generate emails, code and other work without adequately reviewing it, he said this week, effectively transferring the work of figuring out what’s wrong to their colleagues.
There is a fairly obvious management lesson here. If you tell employees that AI use is mandatory, evaluate them on whether they use it, and make additional headcount contingent on proving AI can’t do the work, you should probably expect them to produce a lot of AI-generated work.
Shopify isn’t backing away from AI. The more interesting development is that companies are beginning to discover that maximizing AI adoption and maximizing productivity aren’t necessarily the same thing.
Which brings us, inevitably, to Meta.
Matt Levine occasionally jokes that he could write an entire newsletter consisting only of Elon Musk news. We’re starting to think we could do the same with Meta’s organizational chart.
In August, Reuters reported on “Project OT,” Mark Zuckerberg’s attempt to reorganize Meta around smaller, AI-powered teams, with some teams potentially shrinking by as much as 60%. Meta ultimately cut about 10% of its workforce, but abandoned a planned second company-wide round of layoffs after its AI tools failed to deliver the expected productivity gains and employees pushed back.
That would be enough organizational experimentation for most companies. Meta has also spent years flattening management, only to begin asking some managers to become managers again. Employees have reportedly received mixed messages about “tokenmaxxing”, or maximizing their use of AI. And 26 former employees are suing the company, alleging that AI was used to help select workers for layoffs in ways that disproportionately affected employees who had taken protected leave or sought disability accommodations. Meta disputes the allegations.
At this point we’re considering making Meta Employee Sentiment a permanent newsletter feature. Maybe we’ll put a live ticker on the website.
There would rarely be a dull week.
Looking back ten years, Meta’s overall employee sentiment score was 84.1 in late 2016. It peaked above 85 the following year before beginning a long decline to 69.2 today. Culture has fallen from 84.9 to 57.8, while management has gone from 77.2 to 52.7. The decline accelerated after 2022, but it clearly predates the current round of AI experiments, layoffs and management restructuring.
And then there’s compensation.
It was 85.7 in October 2016. Today it’s 87.5.
For a decade, Meta employees have continued to rate their compensation extraordinarily highly while becoming steadily less positive about almost everything around it. More recently, positive business outlook has moved in the opposite direction too, rising 4.6 points over the past year. They believe in the business. They like the pay. They are enjoying the job less.
That may be the more useful lesson from both companies. Shopify’s problem isn’t that AI doesn’t work, and Meta employees clearly haven’t lost faith in the business. “Use more AI” is considerably easier to manage than what happens after everyone does.
In other human capital news…
- What Have We Learned? The Fissured Workplace: When the Boss Is Three Companies Away Over the past forty years, American companies increasingly learned to keep up productivity while shedding the workers by outsourcing, subcontracting, and otherwise shifting employment to third parties. Yet employment law, built largely around the assumption that a worker can identify the employer responsible for their pay, safety, benefits, and working conditions, has not keep pace. (Humanizing Human Capital)
- More Americans See Business Benefits From Diverse Workforces Americans are increasingly likely to associate workforce diversity with profitability and innovation, with these perceptions becoming more positive among Democrats, independents and Republicans in 2026. But wide partisan differences remain, both in perceptions of the business benefits of diverse workforces and in views of DEI as a business priority. (Gallup)
- Graduating into Disruption: Labor Market Outcomes for AI-Exposed College Majors We find that post-graduation employment, earnings, and job switching patterns among the most AI-exposed college majors began to diverge immediately following the introduction of ChatGPT in late 2022. This earnings decline is comparable in magnitude to the earnings losses associated with graduating into a large recession. (US Census Bureau)
- Corporate America is crushing senior-level mothers Corporate America has long promised women they can have it all. But for senior-level mothers, that promise is looking more like a trap. Fast Company’s reporting reveals a workforce where the demands of work and parenting have intensified in tandem, leaving even highly successful women burned out, stretched thin, and questioning whether the system was ever designed for them to succeed. (Fast Company)
- Fewer Americans Care What CEOs Think of Things Beyond Business Fewer Americans want chief executive officers to speak out about social, environmental or political issues, especially if it has nothing to do with their company’s business, in a notable turnaround from 2018, according to a new study from Stanford University. (Bloomberg)
- The Human Capital Dilemma: Are businesses their own worst enemy? Human capital is still treated as an expense rather than an asset. Our balance sheets are relics of the industrial era, built for a world of tangible goods, not intangible capabilities. The result is a broken equilibrium where investment in people is the first to be cut, and the last to be measured. (People Matters)
- Work Stress Isn’t Always About Workload When employees seem stressed, leaders typically blame workload and respond with the usual remedies: task redistribution, time off, time management training. But a meta-analysis of 515 studies reveals a costly blind spot. Work overload is only one stressor—and not necessarily the most damaging one. (Harvard Business Review)