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Top 20 CEO pay in the S&P 500 is disgusting
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this post was submitted on 20 Sep 2023
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Executives of large companies should always be paid wholly or mostly in stock and not allowed to hedge. This is the only way to be aligned with any 1%er that I can think of, when their interests and those of the common shareholder are unified.
Why should the shareholders interest even be prioritized. What about customers? Or employees? Or the business itself?
This priority on short term profits for stock price is toxic to functional capitalism.
OK some priority is reasonable, the company needs to make some money to pay for investments.
But I absolutely agree, why are we rewarding companies that are practically doing con jobs on their customers?
Why would you buy stock, if they can't make money for investments?
Issuing new stock is mostly for startups and major changes in the business. Not for the normal progression of a company.
I agree more than I disagree actually, but the nuance I'd add is that I think share price should be much less of a focus than company profitability and dividends, as the whole point of owning stock is in owning the excess profits. Trading firms have made the markets into a casino while low Fed rates have made actual profitability more of a side quest for most publicly traded companies. Look at Rivian, nearly worth a trillion dollars before they even had full production? Ludicrous speculation at the cost of everything is the main course for most traders.
Aside from discussing the urgent need for market reforms to make sure companies trade more closely to their fundamental value, I spend more of my time worrying about customers and workers as well. We have a nation addicted to literal slavery through the 13th amendment, it's a disgrace. Putting more people in prison is literally in the interest of certain for-profit prison company shareholders. It's sick.
Saint Milton Friedman (bless him) said that the only societal responsibility of a CEO is to increase the wealth of the company's shareholders.
You wouldn't want the CEOs to disobey the sanctified word of Mimil? The shareholders could go broke, and then how would the wealth treacle down? Did you think of this? No, you only think about not starving, you egoistical prole.
Why should a car owners commute be prioritized... what about disabled? Or downtroden? Or the dealership itself?
This priority on personal vehicals for daily use is toxic to functional transport.
Unironically yes. Check out Strong Towns.
What shareholders want isn't what the customers want, what shareholders want isn't what personnel want, what shareholders want isn't what the public wants either.
The shareholders want to fuck the customer, they want to fuck the employees, and they want to fuck the business itself. Fuck the shareholders. They didn't make the business successful, they didn't have the vision that created the value in the first place, they're leeches that ruin the business for short sighted goals.
Fuck the shareholders, and fuck the executives.
I realize that many people's retirements are tied up in stocks as well. That doesn't make us "shareholders". Without voting rights or a say, we're not really vested in the same manner executives are. When our 401k's go off to a fund manager that makes the decisions for us, we're not really "in the game" as it were. Ideally a company's stock price should be tied to the health of the company, instead what we have are artificial prices inflated by mechanisms such as stock buybacks or the stock price is speculative.
Either way, it's a shit show for us (you know, regular people) and only great for the 1%'ers. I think tying up retirements like we have been is a mistake, look at the many examples of people who lost their retirement assets due to MCI Worldcom, Enron, and Madoff.
It's a joke.
No, they should be paid wages like everybody else, and also hired and fired like everybody else. The idea that a CEO is some kind of special superstar with talents nobody else have is ridiculous. The current situation is a scheme to help keep the 1% in the 1%.
I'm happy to talk about what should be the case in a perfect world, but what I was talking about here is what sometimes is the case and less bad than usual.
Threy are paid wages like everybody else. And a CEO of a fortune 500 company will have special skills that nobody else has. The skills can be learnt mostly. But at companies this big, a CEO is an asset, a good CEO that can provide more growth and profit than anyone else will command a salary, and the market forces ensure that the salary they earn is inline with how much value they bring to the company.
And these people still pay tax, and a lot of it. It’s not possible to argue that a CEO is overpaid because CEO pay at this level is defined by the Market.
You must be disconnected from reality to think like that. What incredible skills do Bezos and Musk have to gain 10000% more than all of their employees combined?
Most businesses thrive despite CEOs, not thanks to them. Worker-owned cooperatives are reliably more stable.
Have you heard of the Panama papers?
Elon Musk and Jeff Bezos are different to people like Tim Cook and Satya Nadella. Bezos took a relatively low salary when he was CEO of Amazon, and Musk takes supposedly no salary, because they don’t earn their wealth from a salary. Tim Cook doesn’t need to be more productive than some factory worker in China making 50 iPhones a day, because if paying him $100mn a year makes Apple $110mn a year vs someone else who takes $50k a year and brings Apple $2mn. They still take Cook because the profit is $10mn vs $1.95mn. Like I said, it’s about who can make the most money for the company.
I am very very sceptical about your claim that most businesses thrive without CEOs. Every medium to large company has a CEO, unless it’s a cooperative in which case they have a chair (and in large cooperatives, these chairs still command high salaries). John Lewis, the largest cooperative in the UK, has a chair who earns a salary of £990k.
And finally some people do dodge tax, not everyone does. In 2016, Tim Cook was awarded a $135mn salary, on which he paid $70mn in taxes. What am I supposed to say to this point really? Some people commit tax fraud, it’s still a crime. Maybe it’s not followed as much as it should be, but it’s still illegal.
What does this mean? Is it not fact that in the capitalist system of the US, the market is a real thing. It’s not just something people say, it is the economy, and economics is based in mathematics (at least they try to base it in mathematics).
CEOs of large companies have power because large companies have power, but ultimately the people with the most power are the controlling board members of a company. The board chooses a C level executive’s salary based in what they think that person brings to the table in terms of monetary value, obviously they don’t know for certain, they don’t have a specific number, but for large companies like the ones on this list, it must work pretty well for most of them, or they wouldn’t use this method. Ultimately, the board cares about profit and growth, and they treat the people at the C suite as tools to get that profit. Companies pay a lot of money for something that will make them more money, and so when you think of a CEO as a person you will never be able to justify their compensation, but when you think of them as an object for making profit, you can see how it becomes more justifiable.
I’m not saying they are at the mercy of their job, how can you be when you have a hundred million dollars. My argument is that CEOs aren’t payed on the same principal that a regular employee is paid, they are paid like a business tool rather than an employee, as if they are some object that generates profit. And I’m sure it helps to be on good terms with powerful people, and being the CEO of a fortune 500 company would make you a powerful person too. But ultimately a CEO is paid according to the value they bring to the company and for that reason alone.
Give up. These conversations are dominated by teenagers who are bringing their vast experience working a shit job for an hourly wage.
They think they're making some moral/social outcry against a symptom of capitalism, thinking that if we could just cure the symptom, the disease will improve. (Same people say nothing about athlete's pay, but here we are. LOL, that one used to be a source of public outcry.)
CEOs get these salaries and benefits because the market is willing to pay it, thinks it's a fair deal. There's nothing more to it.
If you have a billion-dollar company, and you want the best leadership, you pay for that. Want some dude who says, "Sure, I can handle it. Only need $250,000/yr. I got this."? Of course not. You want someone with a track record of handling... whatever it is you're hiring for.
Sure, sometimes they fuck up, just like any employer. But do these people think they're smarter than the Alpha board of directors?! Yes they do.
And spare me the, "They don't work 1,000% harder!". Yeah. We know because it's obvious to any simpleton. That's not a point worth making.
And spare me, "The workers should get that money!" Dude was bitching on reddit about American Airlines, their CEO and pay. I did the math. If you stripped him of every penny and spread it around, worked out to $.02/hr. more for each employee.
CEO pay ain't the fucking problem. It's only a symptom of unfettered capitalism.
And one last addition to my rant. :)
Listen: People pay you for what you can do for them. That's how you make money. Hard work barely figures in.
Don't get me started on making social connections. Somehow these people forget we're apes and that sort of thing is important.
Absolutely not, the wages for most CEOs are almost irrelevant, the major income for most is from stock, where they are regularly given stock, and have cheap stock options on top of that.
What I'm stating is that they should be paid according to their actual skill set, like other workers. That is according to their education and experience. And not fantastic amounts hundreds or even thousands times more than normal workers. There is no way one person can realistically be worth 100 times a normal worker. CEO is not a unique skillset, which is evident from the fact that most CEOs come from sales. The same place you also get your best con men. Sorry I hope no offense to hardworking salespeople out there.
I disagree with much here, but maybe you're onto something with the stock option thing. It would have to be legislated, and the devil's details are legion, but what if?
What if we said, "Your company profits/grosses >$X, then you can't offer executive stock options." Again, devilish details, and it's not realistically passable legislation. But what if major CEOs were thereby forced to look past the next quarter?
I work for a software dev, only 130 of us. Our CEO reports to a board of directors and will tell them quick, "We expect to lose money next year because we're investing in personnel and dialing in tech debt." And it works and the board loves it. (I know this because he shares such things in front of the whole company, every month. And shows us the numbers.)
Crazy thing? Because of his forward thinking, we keep making more money, even when we expect to lose. Nuts how that works out. :)
You know income from stocks is still taxed as income. Everything you said in the first paragraph is still taxed as income.
You may be right in your second paragraph, but in the capitalist economy these companies operate in, that won’t happen, because like I’ve said before, a CEO is paid according to how much additional profit and growth they can bring to the table. At that level it’s not about technical skill but about leadership and forward thinking.
And I do think that a CEO can justifiably earn a lot more than an average worker, especially at a large company because of the personal risk and responsibility that comes with the job role. But only in some cases. Obviously the CEO of shell is not putting themself under more personal risk than the high pressure underwater welder, not by a long shot. And they are probably still paid 50x their salary at least. In a capitalist system, the ones who bring the most value and take the most risk are rewarded the most, that’s just how it is. Is it just? That’s for the individual to decide, but that’s just how it is.
Don’t they get massive RSUs on top of the obscene salary?
Yes, but RSUs aren't actually stocks, and I don't think of them as a very effective way of unifying the interests of an RSU holder with the shareholder per se.
Source: https://ceoworld.biz/2017/02/28/advantage-rsus-ceo-compensation-package/