Seems like he could just fake this by writing a note to his best friend that says “during the next approved stock trading window I will sell X shares of GOOG to you for Y dollars”.
Admittedly: 1. technically this is a derivative (maybe illegal?) 2. principal agent risk (he might not follow through on the note) 3. his best friend might encourage him to work harder for GOOG to succeed
But I have a hard time believing any of those would be a problem in the real world, assuming TurnTrout and his friend are reasonably virtuous about actually not wanting TurnTrout to make a profit off of GOOG.
You could come up with more complicated versions of the same thing. For example instead of his best friend, TurnTrout could gift the profit to an for-charity LLC that had AI Alignment as its mandate. This would (assuming it was set up correctly) eliminate 1. and 3.
your example agreement with a friend is obviously a derivative, which is just a contract whose value depends on the value of an underlying asset (google stock in this case). If it’s not a formal derivative contract you might be less likely to get in trouble for it compared to doing it on robinhood or whatever (not legal advice!) but it doesn’t seem like a very good idea.
Seems like he could just fake this by writing a note to his best friend that says “during the next approved stock trading window I will sell X shares of GOOG to you for Y dollars”.
Admittedly:
1. technically this is a derivative (maybe illegal?)
2. principal agent risk (he might not follow through on the note)
3. his best friend might encourage him to work harder for GOOG to succeed
But I have a hard time believing any of those would be a problem in the real world, assuming TurnTrout and his friend are reasonably virtuous about actually not wanting TurnTrout to make a profit off of GOOG.
You could come up with more complicated versions of the same thing. For example instead of his best friend, TurnTrout could gift the profit to an for-charity LLC that had AI Alignment as its mandate. This would (assuming it was set up correctly) eliminate 1. and 3.
your example agreement with a friend is obviously a derivative, which is just a contract whose value depends on the value of an underlying asset (google stock in this case). If it’s not a formal derivative contract you might be less likely to get in trouble for it compared to doing it on robinhood or whatever (not legal advice!) but it doesn’t seem like a very good idea.