Did they get their fair share of that ‘grossly overpaying’ by Yahoo?
If they owned shares, yes. If they didn’t, then why should they? The owners of the company sold the company at a massively overinflated valuation, so the shares were “worth” a lot of money. This really isn’t a complicated situation.
Work and ownership are not the same. If I hire a plumber to fix something in my house, does he become a part owner of it?
If you hire a plumber, you do it as a customer and not an employer. Quite a difference!
A customer pays the full value of the purchase, the plumber is the one in charge and charges as much as possible. That’s how they make profit. That’s why you still own your toilet, the plumber already got the full value they were owed.
An employer never pays the full value, though! The employer, as the one in charge, pays as little as possible. They pockst the difference as profit. That means the employees are always cheated out of the full value of their labor, they are never paid what they are actually worth.
Because the only ethical kind of company is a worker-owned co-op. It should not have been possible for employees to not own shares, but it was, and that’s bad.