Owners of the corporation are called shareholders. Every corporation must authorize the number of shares available to be issued to shareholders in its Articles of Incorporation. Once all of the authorized shares have been issued, the corporation cannot issue additional new shares until the Articles of Incorporation are amended to authorize more shares.
Unless otherwise specified, we recommend authorizing 10,000 shares of stock and then issuing only 1,000 shares to the initial shareholders, leaving 9,000 shares available for future investors and shareholders. Each shareholder’s percentage ownership interest is determined by dividing the number of shares issued to the shareholder by the total number of shares issued to all shareholders. For example, if there are two initial shareholders who each want to own 50% of the corporation, each shareholder would be issued 500 shares.
A corporation must pay corporate taxes on its profits at the state and federal levels unless it makes an S-Corp election, which allows the profits and losses to pass through to the individual shareholders. This avoids double taxation on profits at the corporate level and on dividends at the individual shareholder level. You cannot make the S-Corp election if there will be more than 100 shareholders or if any of the shareholders is a corporation or LLC.