The $184K is net profit, so each employee's salary is already counted. Another way of thinking about it: every Apple employee can get a $180K salary increase and they'd still make money.
A better interpretation would be: if the employees owned the company, they'd (effectively) get that much more per year. Instead, shareholders own the company so that money is (effectively) given in equity to the shareholders each year.
Shareholders are the last to be paid in the event of a liquidation (equity is by definition assets minus liabilities) and dividends are not a cost (unlike interest payments).
They are far ahead of the employees though. Employees have no claims on assets (except for unpaid, contractual provisions such as earned wages) in event of a liquidation.
Dividends are a cost to the organization. They are resources that will never be recovered. However, from the point of view of the shareholder it is personal income. If dividends are not a cost to the organization, what are they?
Shareholders are not "far ahead" of employees, because there is no one behind shareholders. Employees get what they are owed before shareholders see a cent. Why should they get more than that? Maybe you think customers should get a piece of the pie, too? Or competitors?
Dividends are the distribution of a part of the profit (or maybe retained earnings, if the current earnings are not enough) to shareholders. Profit is what is left from revenue after costs. Unless you want to redefine the basic accounting terms, dividends cannot be a cost.
Gas probably doesn't give a shit, used to be mixed with a bunch of stuff in the earth before someone distilled it out and it eventually ended up in a tank, ready to be exploded.
Was just an example of a positive "yes" answer to your question.
Surely, the Apple employees use Apple's property when creating value. The employees -- presumably -- don't own the desk they sit at, the computer they use at work, the building in which they work. And they don't pay the bill from TSMC when wafers need to be produced -- Apple pays for all these things. It is able to do this, in part, because it has hoarded cash.
I'm sure you wouldn't claim that it's possible for the employees to create the value without the assets owned by Apple. Does the Apple employees have the savings to pay the $100M bill from TSMC, when a new generation of SOCs need to be produced? They would certainly all have to work from home, because they wouldn't have a building they could all sit in, without using the property of Apple.
Seems to me like Apple and its employees are in a symbiotic relationship, that benefits both parties.
But what about the customers? If a customer buys a $1k laptop and gets $2k out of value from it, the customers are effectively exploiting the workers more than Apple the organization could ever dream of. Where would you draw the line?
If you create $2k of value with a laptop, it's you who created that value. You just exploited yourself, using the laptop as your tool. Did I misunderstand your question?
