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Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

arstechnica.com

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Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#62

I’m curious to hear why it matters how much anyone makes. If the concern is that they’ll buy too much critical stuff, why not just limit that? If the concern is outsized political influence, why not stop that? Etc. I will say it’s strange the government doesn’t have substantial stake in this company given the subsidies. Same with Tesla and many others too.

The concern here is that the profits were made possible by significant contributions from taxpayers [1] [2]. Privatized gains, socialized losses. [1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2022-07-29/covid-19-... [2] https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC9975718/

I don’t think profits being made in part due to tax payers is an issue. It is an issue though that the taxpayers, through the government, do not have equity in the profit making machine, yes.

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#63

I’m curious to hear why it matters how much anyone makes. If the concern is that they’ll buy too much critical stuff, why not just limit that? If the concern is outsized political influence, why not stop that? Etc. I will say it’s strange the government doesn’t have substantial stake in this company given the subsidies. Same with Tesla and many others too.

Let's say there are 1000 people in an economy with $1M floating around.

In one version of this scenario, every person ends up with $1000.

In another version, most people end up with $500, and one person ends up with $500,000.

This creates a scenario where the preferences of that one individual come to dominate the structure of the economy (because the preferences of the other 999 people will, in aggregate, be scatted and diverse).

So this sort of distribution of income system creates an outsize influence in the ongoing nature of the economy, for no reason than that one person was somehow able to end up with a revenue flow 1000x larger than anyone else.

Now, it could possibly that this person is very, very good at doing whatever they do to achieve such revenue. But is that any reason whatsoever to grant them such outsize influence over the nature of the economy?

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#65

Why is this news? Oh right, because everyone predicting this would happen in 2020 and 2021 was hastily banned from social media and given the greenlight by legacy media to be ostracized and marginalized by the body politic using the most utterly vacuous rhetoric imaginable. All the tobacco executives now working in the pharma industry must feel accomplished.

Wait, I thought that it was socialism or something to complain about income multiples at public corporations? Did they suddenly get ostracized and marginalized from the body politic, after years of being a core part of the US political system? Jeessh, you blink and you miss it.

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#66
post #46
post #18

We should just go back to like 80% tax rate after $100M income.

How much revenue do you expect from such a tax bracket? You should do some napkin math to see if it’ll actually make a difference. I suspect very few people report income in excess of $100M and an 80% bracket would do very little for society other than a vindictive gesture to placate the masses. Not saying we should or shouldn’t…but it’s not gonna fix all our problems like people think.

> You should do some napkin math to see if it’ll actually make a difference.

The napkin math says: 3900 employees. 400M is 2435x median income in the company, so that's $164k. So if we gave the CEO the same income as the median, and split the 400M across everybody else, they'd all have received a $102k bonus, a 62%-of-median-income bonus.

You tell me if a 62% bonus for the year would make any difference in your life or not.

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#67

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up the rates of heart damage from actually getting Covid without being vaccinated?

Remember, it took a year for the vaccines to be available. In the meantime everyone was contracting the virus and virtually everyone recovered. So if these vaccines magically reversed heart damage caused from contracting the virus, it's news to me and you should be able to cite a peer reviewed study not funded by the manufacturers or their investors.

>In the meantime everyone was contracting the virus and virtually everyone recovered.

Aside from the half million excess deaths in the US in 2020?

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#68

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Look up the rates of heart damage from actually getting Covid without being vaccinated?

Remember, it took a year for the vaccines to be available. In the meantime everyone was contracting the virus and virtually everyone recovered. So if these vaccines magically reversed heart damage caused from contracting the virus, it's news to me and you should be able to cite a peer reviewed study not funded by the manufacturers or their investors.

> Remember, it took a year for the vaccines to be available. In the meantime everyone was contracting the virus and virtually everyone recovered.

“Everyone” didn't contract the cirus in the time between the first case and the first vaccine deployment.

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#69
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much revenue do you expect from such a tax bracket? You should do some napkin math to see if it’ll actually make a difference. I suspect very few people report income in excess of $100M and an 80% bracket would do very little for society other than a vindictive gesture to placate the masses. Not saying we should or shouldn’t…but it’s not gonna fix all our problems like people think.

> You should do some napkin math to see if it’ll actually make a difference. The napkin math says: 3900 employees. 400M is 2435x median income in the company, so that's $164k. So if we gave the CEO the same income as the median, and split the 400M across everybody else, they'd all have received a $102k bonus, a 62%-of-median-income bonus. You tell me if a 62% bonus for the year would make any difference in your life…

Very convenient of you to entirely sidestep discussion of the original point: “80% income tax bracket at >$100M”

It’s ridiculous that so many users of this startup accelerator forum want to ban private ownership. I guess I’ll bite…

Why would anyone start/own a company if the government is just gonna liquidate your legal ownership? It would be more lucrative to find the easiest job and do the bare minimum than be CEO under your half baked authoritarian system.

But why is this even a response in the first place to OP? Stick to the topic or else you come off like a religious zealot.

Re: Moderna CEO made $400M last year–2,435x the median salary of employees

#70
post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

How much revenue do you expect from such a tax bracket? You should do some napkin math to see if it’ll actually make a difference. I suspect very few people report income in excess of $100M and an 80% bracket would do very little for society other than a vindictive gesture to placate the masses. Not saying we should or shouldn’t…but it’s not gonna fix all our problems like people think.

> You should do some napkin math to see if it’ll actually make a difference. The napkin math says: 3900 employees. 400M is 2435x median income in the company, so that's $164k. So if we gave the CEO the same income as the median, and split the 400M across everybody else, they'd all have received a $102k bonus, a 62%-of-median-income bonus. You tell me if a 62% bonus for the year would make any difference in your life…

Pretty sure the median Moderna employee who’s been around as long as the CEO has seen some very nice pop to their stock comp as well.
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