What about getting paid in stock? Then should you have loyalty?
a) you're allowed to sell them.
b) somebody is willing to buy them
or c) you get a dividend and own a significant portion.
The value of most stocks in companies is overrated. Yes, your company might be the next google and you'll hit gold but most companies shares are worth little to nothing. Depending on the company structure they might have some interesting rights attached - such as being allowed a look in the books, being invited to the shareholders meeting etc. Stuff that allows you to judge how well your company is doing. Just don't take them as if their cash value is fixed. It will be somewhere between 0 and infinity.
If the Efficient Market Hypothesis is true (it's certainly approximately true), then most stocks, most of the time, have exactly the value they ought to have. So no, on average, stocks aren't overrated and investors aren't fools.
A lot of those are not or only partially investor backed. Even of those that are, most fail, their stock value effectively nil. Of the rest, a large share basically just breaks even which makes their stock pretty much untradeable since practically nobody wants to buy shares in a company that will probably never have a large growth. The tiny tiny rest grows in leaps and bounds and is the next google/facebook/, the stock value multiplying by factors of 10 or more.
Investing in stocks of small startups is a risky business - on average you can make a lot of money, but it takes a lot of capital and endurance to have a large enough portfolio that you actually achieve the average. Otherwise it's luck. My point is: Don't see shares in a company as income. It's an investment and a risky one. Do that with money you can afford to loose and effectively write it off until you've really sold it or the company went public.
Also most people's utility functions are not linear in money - but those of rich people/institutions are much closer to linear, and rich people/institutions dominate the market.