kabalman2000 wrote:Another good chapter.
But Kit certainly isn't as poor as I thought. With 1000 shares of being 1.666% of the stock and Vil's 66.666% pulling in $12 million in dividends, that gets Kit about 200 thousand after tax dollars a year. Which would allow him to buy a pretty darn nice house free and clear within 3 to 5 years just off that money. And it's not his only investment. Yes, the Vulpan's have a
very different definition of poor than most other people
.
And it seems pretty obvious that Vil is scheming to acquire Kit his own personal jet. The interesting thing is how she's going to get him to accept it (considering a used one goes for $5 million or so). This will get interesting when Fel gets back around to it.
Actually, the combined dividends of the stocks would gross him about $140,000 a year after taxes. Vil gets more because of how her CEO contract is set up, her dividend is calculated as a weighted percentage of the gross profit, before it's divided between the company and the stockholders, which means she earns more per stock than the others on the dividend. To say it in simple terms, she earns a dividend based on the gross profit of the companies, where the other stockholders earn based on the net profit.
As I think you've noticed, everything in the Vulpan companies has always heavily favored the CEO, feeding on the "king of the family" mantra that pervades their family structure. Maybe now you understand why Zach was so hot to take control of the companies instead of giving it to Vil.
And yes, the Vulpans DO see "poor" in a different light.
They think Vil is poor, because she only has a net worth, not counting her stocks, of about $17 million. But, if you factor in the value of her shares of the 3 Vulpan companies, her net worth is approximately $3.1 BILLION dollars, based on how much a share of Vulpan stock would go for if it was traded publicly. However, since the Vulpan stocks are closed and are never sold, their intrinsic values are basically ignored except for the dividend potential they give the holder. After all, she CANNOT sell her stocks, it's a direct part of her contract as the CEO and the means by which she holds power in the family and the company. She'd be a maniac to sell them anyway.
Kit was no fool when he had Vil work it to get him Vulpan stocks. He knew that they'd be rock-solid dependable income for life. It was something of a sacrifice on his part, if you think about it, since he doesn't really want anything to do with the family fortune. But he's also not so proud that he doesn't see that with a baby on the way, financial security must take precedence over his pride. With the Vulpan stocks, Kit is literally going to be earning 2 incomes, which frees up Jessie to do what she WANTS, not what she HAS to do.
It's always all about Jessie, and their baby, in his mind.
Jessie hasn't quite made the connection yet. When she sees the first quarterly dividends that are disbursed in April, she's going to be in for quite a shock. She's an English major, not an accountant.
Kit isn't just going to squirrel it away. Using the dividend money, he's going to invest more heavily in the magazine, give it a cash infusion to give them a chance to see how fast they can expand. It's the other parts of his investment portfolio that are going to be saved to build up a fund for the kids. Kit fully intends to pass on not just money, but a thriving business to his children, the same way Arthur Vulpan, the founder of Vulpan Shipyards, passed on his successful shipyard down to his family.
And is Vil trying to give him a personal jet? Well, she's thinking about it. She understands Kit, she knows that he only knuckles under when given something he NEEDS, not necessarily something she thinks he should have. But a jet...well, that would be a gray area, and a serious moral quandary for Kit. His boyhood dream would war against his desire to stay independent of the Vulpan family, for taking something like that would just let Vil sink her claws into him that much more deeply. She's already managed to get a hold on him, and now he knows she's going to become very, very persistent about making him take what she believes the family owes him, six years of back pay for their mistreatment of him.
Vil isn't done with him yet, though, that's for certain.
Just another guy from the shallow end of the gene pool.
Or, "The only way I could get hanger space was to buy the CJ2 that goes in that spot. Now, I don't have need for the jet, but you could use it." 
