Eli5 what’s the difference between buying the stocks of a business and buying the business directly?
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A corporation’s ownership is broken up into stocks. Quantities vary. Each stock is worth 1 vote at a shareholder meeting on whatever comes up.
Stocks also often are things you can trade based on expectations of values going up/down, and some corporations will distribute their excess cash in the bank to shareholders also bestowing the shares some value. So people do own stocks without planning on participating in the meeting and votes, just because they treat them as an investment thing instead.
If you want to “buy” a corporation, you need a controlling majority of the shares. That is, 50% + 1 share, ensuring your vote just automatically wins. Now you can just “vote” out the current board of directors, replace them with your own nominations (presumably yourself will be one of them) and do what you want.
Of course this only applies to corporations, and they’re like this because they’re considered separate entities from those people who originally created it. Smaller bussinesses are usually owned by one or a few people, and you can just convince them to let you have it in exchange for a bunch of money. If they’ll sell, of course.
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