The problem with all of that is that you assume that somehow you can ultimately trade your shares in to get your percentage value of the business. But you can't. All you can do with it is sell it to someone else.

Once the company has sold its shares, in an IPO or later, those shares are no longer really attached to the company. Sure, if you managed to collect more than 50% of the shares, you'd magically become the effective owner of the company. Similar deal if you had a plurality of the shares. But for the common man who owns 10 shares of Microsoft, it has no inherent value. You cannot get any money out of it other than selling it to someone else, who, in turn, cannot get any money out of it besides selling it to someone else.

There's no way to "redeem" your shares. You can't go to the company with your shares and tell them that you'd like to trade in your hundred shares for, say, one of their computers. They'd tell you to go jump in a lake.

It's effectively just a shiny bauble you can line your nest with. Fortunately, a good deal many other people seem to like those shiny baubles just as much as you do.