[Gambit]

Stu, the LLC is a legal category of business whose main purpose is to protect the people that run it or invest in it from being sued out of house and home. It's not as complicated or expensive to run as a full-blown S-corp or C-corp, and other business entities such as single-proprietor or partnership don't do squat in this regard. On the downside, you don't get the tax advantages of schedule S or C.

See, without such legal protection, I could own any amount of stock in Huge Giant Company X, which makes a colossal Enron-style boo-boo, and then get held responsible for a portion of HGCX's legal damages - which might or might not be equivalent to the percentage of shares owned by me. Without such protections, businesses would have a hard time raising money and there would be no such thing as "venture capital." Well, there might, but it'd be a heck of a lot harder to get.