I get the impression that employees of KNC buy miners to mine themselves, but KNC isn't a mining company like Asicminer.
The difference between owners/employees of KnC buying miners at cost and mining personally or KnC mining as a company isn't really relevant to us as customers. We have no idea how many units they'll use personally and we don't know how much of a hashrate they are targeting. To me the most relevant differences I see between AM mining and KnC mining is that AM is publicly traded and we know what AM's goals for network hashrate are.
As I see it if they were mining as a company, they would have no incentive to price under roi. If employees buy at same prices as everyone else, they have incentive for bigger roi. Of course transparency is another question.
Edit: side note kind of off topic, but I was just looking at the order list page and it only comes to like $700,000 or about 40 th. I think that only a smallish percentage might be listed there.
I do not believe that KnC employees (owners) would pay anything more than cost for buying their own equipment. And the price doesn't really matter - to get specific, Sam could pay $1 or $1M for each Jupiter he purchases since he's a recipient of a share of the profits (or loss) from each sale made.
You are right, it's a matter of transparency and personally I doubt that KnC will share the exact number of units they'll be allocating to personal use vs selling - after all, they don't need to disclose this.
* Full disclosure - I don't have a problem with KnC mining with their own hardware. They were honest about it and we have to accept this or not purchase the equipment from them. I just don't see any point in suggesting that this is significantly different than AM or ActiveMiner or any other company that manufactures and mines with their own equipment.