Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

theregister.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

111–120 of 259 posts

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#111

Post by evandale »

OminousWeapons wrote: post #88
wincy wrote: post #19

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So Jeff Bezos creating a company that employs people and grows the economy in a non zero sum way through efficiency gains shouldn’t be rewarded billions for the trouble? Why are people so concerned with the salary of the ultra rich? It doesn’t make your life objectively worse, if anything our lives are substantially better because of it, even if you don’t directly shop at Amazon.

> Why are people so concerned with the salary of the ultra rich? Two reasons. First it's because the left lets Twitter determine their messaging and so the economic problems facing the country have been framed incorrectly with an unnecessary moral slant. The economic problems facing the poor are not a function of "wealth inequality" (the delta between rich and poor), but instead are a function of the poor having insu…

> they are jealous and misinformed. They have zero understanding of what an executive's job actually entails / they don't know anyone in such a role, and as such they (incorrectly) think anyone could do it. Therefore they don't understand why executives are receiving very high levels of comp or amassing massive net worths when they don't appear to be "doing" anything.

Yep. It's the same jealously when people are paid millions to just shoot a ball in a hoop. Like, no. You shoot a ball into a hoop and have people who will pay $1000 to watch you do it.

One of my favourite punchlines:

Tapping with a hammer $2.00

Knowing where to tap $9,998.00

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#112

Post by Supermancho »

mikkergp wrote: post #70
Supermancho wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It's hard but we pay CEO's $212 million dollars a year to do hard things. *21m/yr, if you read the details.

My bad. You're right. I think my point still stands though ;-). Some of these companies are really good at figuring out hard things.

I would tend to agree that corporations are better than any other organization at prolonged, directed, problem solving than government or public university research.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#113

Post by xiaosun »

ctvo wrote: post #4

> Jassy's executive compensation package, which is tied to Amazon stock price and mostly delivered as stock awards over a multi-year period, was $212 million in 2021. They used "multi-year" here over the actual timeline: 10 years. It sounds a lot less outrageous that his pay is heavily based on the stock price and comes out to be ~21 million a year as the head of one of the largest tech companies in the world. Here a…

The award is for 61000 shares, which would have been worth $212M as of the 12/31/2021 share price. It's worth far less now.

Quite frankly, this is as sensible of a comp package for a CEO as one could propose. Compensated in primarily in equity with a long horizon for vesting. If a company wanted its executive to be aligned with the interests of its shareholders, is there really a better structure?

Aligning the incentives of the CEO to the incentives of shareholders by awarding the equivalent of an 0.012% ownership stake seems reasonable to me.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#114

Post by kelseyfrog »

bigfudge wrote: post #79
kelseyfrog wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Theoretically or in practice? Practically, we haven't yet developed anti-fragile socio-ideological technologies which can out compete shareholder-maximization ideologies(SMIs). Instead SMIs are adept at castrating anti-SMIs and rendering them inert before they can establish a foothold. The world we enter into today is the product of this anti-SMI castration. You can even see echos of the great SMI war play out whenev…

Not in the US, but Germany and Scandinavian countries show this very much is a possibility. Medium sized firms in Germany just don’t behave the same way they do in the US and large enterprises are subject to far more state intervention. And it still works fine.

Yes. My comment was very US-centric. You're right; the outcomes are demonstrably true. Board-level representation is a good example of this. Maybe asking rhetorically in a different way - what is the series of chess moves where that goal is achieved?

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#115

Post by evandale »

ciabattabread wrote: post #110
evandale wrote: post #90

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job. IMO it's even worse than that. Not only do we expect corporations to do the government's job, we're also giving corporations more power than we give governments. Just look at the "it's a private company they can censor whoever they want!" crowd. They actually believe companies who control over half the content we're expos…

What aspect of “private company” do you not understand? No shit they have the power to censor on the platforms they control.

>What aspect of “private company” do you not understand?

The part where they're given more power than we give the government.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#116

Post by krainboltgreene »

vhgyu75e6u wrote: post #109
bluetidepro wrote: post #100

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged. Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! How out of touch with reality are you, if you think th…

How much money has Tom Brady or Jassy made for the patriots/Amazon due to their leadership? If they brought 500M then 25M seems fair.

Tom Brady did actual work for his team, a CEO does not do $500M worth of work. If there were no employees other than the CEO then the $500M doesn't get made.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#117

Post by justapassenger »

bluetidepro wrote: post #100
weezin wrote: post #97

21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged.

> 21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged. Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! How out of touch with reality are you, if you think th…

> Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!!

Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring.

> How out of touch with reality are you, if you think that's acceptable for any human to make that kind of money when majority of the world can hardly afford food.

Livable conditions for all humans have nothing to do with how to compensate top of the of the top people in their profession. By mixing those 2, you're only hurting your case.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#118

Post by Auracle »

Kerrick wrote: post #105
ctvo wrote: post #4

> Jassy's executive compensation package, which is tied to Amazon stock price and mostly delivered as stock awards over a multi-year period, was $212 million in 2021. They used "multi-year" here over the actual timeline: 10 years. It sounds a lot less outrageous that his pay is heavily based on the stock price and comes out to be ~21 million a year as the head of one of the largest tech companies in the world. Here a…

That $212 million was starkly contrasted by the next point in the article, that Warehouse workers typically make $15/hr. It would take about 7,000 years working that wage (full-time) to make the same $212,000,000. It's still a _huge_ gulf, whether the CEO's compensation is in one year or one decade.

Right, but if you were to take all $212 million and divvy it up to the nearly 1 million US Amazon employees it wouldn’t go very far.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#119

Post by weezin »

bluetidepro wrote: post #100
weezin wrote: post #97

21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged.

> 21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged. Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! How out of touch with reality are you, if you think th…

I'm more pointing out that people don't rage against the machine like you are doing when an athlete signs a new contract.

Re: Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay

#120

Post by krainboltgreene »

anonporridge wrote: post #32
jaywalk wrote: post #25

Most of the stuff in the "ethics overhaul" is pie in the sky nonsense. Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations" What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?

I agree. It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job. Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people, and it is almost impossible for the people to countervail the control authority of the extremely small set of owners who own the majority of voting shares. Let the justice system crack down on people or organizations "violating human rights" and…

> It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job

They are already doing the government's job by hosting their servers.

Post reply on HN