They are the same. You said it yourself: STEALING

Doing something that negatively impacts their stock price could be categorized as "stealing" from a billionaire. Is that really stealing?

Purposely infringing on a company's trademarks/copyrights/marketing/etc (I don't mean pirating movies/books/etc) to gain publicity/get started could be called stealing from that company. But I don't consider that immoral in the slightest.

There often isn't simple terminology for discussing these differences, so people use shortcuts like this.

> Doing something that negatively impacts their stock price could be categorized as "stealing" from a billionaire. Is that really stealing?

No. There isn't much of a grey area around stealing.

> not meant to be literal

What's amusing when people try to reframe stealing as "liberating", or "getting paid", meaning they know it's dishonorable.

Such is the case when I'm talking about subjects I have practical experience in but little formal knowledge of.

A friend of mine years ago worked at Microsoft. He noticed that one of his colleagues was pilfering things in the office, and when asked about it said it was ok to steal from Microsoft because it was a wealthy company. One day, he found a stack of 4 hubcaps on his chair. He asked around, and my friend said "oh, I put those on your chair. I figured I'd give you a hand so you don't have to steal hubcaps from the parking lot." He got the message and that was the end of the pilfering.