CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations • Hacker News Board

Re: CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations

#141

Post by VirusNewbie » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 11:31 PM UTC

johnecheck wrote: post #110

VirusNewbie wrote: post #23

This in particular seems silly to post to the hackernews crowd, as this seems to imply the majority of stock goes to senior execs, when large tech companies are literally paying out tens of billions of dollars to the average tech worker.

No, large tech companies are not paying out tens of billions of dollars to the average worker. Did you mean that tens of billions of dollars are going to ALL the tech workers combined? True, but a single absolute number means little when the conversation is about relative distribution of resources and how those numbers change over time.

what is the claim here? That the majority of the tens of billions are given to what, L7 and above? L10?

Re: CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations

#142

Post by alfalfasprout » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 11:31 PM UTC

mnky9800n wrote: post #60

nostrademons wrote: post #8

It’s entirely possible that this is causal ABs deliberate, ie the reason why boards of these companies have approved large CEO pay packages is so that the CEO will align themselves with the shareholders paying them rather than the workers working for them and cut wages so the money can be returned to shareholders as buybacks.

Do you have an iPhone? Mine is constantly turning “and” into “ABs” when I type with swipe.

weird, I'm running into this with IOS 26 beta as well

Re: CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations

#143

Post by danny_codes » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 11:31 PM UTC

slashdave wrote: post #91

tw04 wrote: post #86

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What’s the motivation of the CEO to increase employee wages if his compensation isn’t tied to theirs? There’s this perverse belief that companies should exist to enrich the wealthy shareholders at the expense of the workers and it’s put us dangerously close to a complete collapse of the social contract.

The motivation? A healthy and productive workforce. The greater good. Not sure why you would tie pure compensation (a greedy concept) with goals that align exactly to the opposite.

People who become CEOs tend not to care about other people. Sort of a prerequisite to the job in a lot of cases. See that UHC guy as a prime example.

Re: CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations

#144

Post by simianwords » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 11:31 PM UTC

justinrubek wrote: post #136

simianwords wrote: post #112

I did an exercise here: the average CEO salary of S&P 500 is around $20M. That's around $10B totally. Assume there are three executives - so thats around $30B annually. Lets go much further, lets multiply this by 10 to account for top 5000 companies (in practice it would be more like top 20,000 because the lower companies have much lower CEO salaries). There are around 300 million people in USA. By redistributing the…

I'm not convinced that diluting it this far is a fully effective thought experiment. If you took half of that $900 and distributed it amongst 500,000 instead of 300 million, then it'd be a more formidable amount. I'm not sure why it needs to be equally distributed. Just putting it back into the economy otherwise is good enough.

I agree with you. I prefer it more centrally allocated - with the CEO's as the market intended.

Re: CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations

#145

Post by ianhawes » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 11:31 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #112

I did an exercise here: the average CEO salary of S&P 500 is around $20M. That's around $10B totally. Assume there are three executives - so thats around $30B annually. Lets go much further, lets multiply this by 10 to account for top 5000 companies (in practice it would be more like top 20,000 because the lower companies have much lower CEO salaries). There are around 300 million people in USA. By redistributing the…

Similarly if you seized 100% of the wealth of the top 400 Americans[0] and liquidated all of their assets to cash, then you'd have ~$5.4T (assuming you didn't completely destroy the economy in the process, which you would but for the sake of the argument assume you wouldn't), which is around 15% of the US Public Debt OR about 3 years worth of the U.S. Budget Deficit.

Re: CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations

#146

Post by Aurornis » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 11:31 PM UTC

DeRock wrote: post #132

simianwords wrote: post #112

I did an exercise here: the average CEO salary of S&P 500 is around $20M. That's around $10B totally. Assume there are three executives - so thats around $30B annually. Lets go much further, lets multiply this by 10 to account for top 5000 companies (in practice it would be more like top 20,000 because the lower companies have much lower CEO salaries). There are around 300 million people in USA. By redistributing the…

Another way to look at it is every single person, including children, are paying $75 a month for executives of 5000 public companies. Or $190 per month per household. That is significantly more than the average electricity bill ($130/month). Downplaying that shows you are out of touch with the average American.

> Another way to look at it is every single person, including children, are paying $75 a month for executives of 5000 public companies.

No they are not. The economy isn’t a zero-sum game where the only way an executive can get paid is by taking money from a household.

Executive compensation is largely equity based. The mostly equity is new value created in the economy.

Using zero-sum thinking for economic topics like this is very misleading.

Re: CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations

#147

Post by shortrounddev2 » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 11:33 PM UTC

stickfigure wrote: post #108

beezle wrote: post #92

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If one does not think that buy backs are good to begin with, making them as difficult as possible (as was the case before the mid 80s) is preferable to the situation today.

As has been pointed out elsewhere, buybacks are morally equivalent to shareholder dividends; the only effective difference is the tax treatment. If you think returning money to investors is bad, I have to ask: Why would anyone invest in the first place?

If the only difference is how much of the profit is socialized vs privatized, then they are not morally equivalent

Re: CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations

#148

Post by fragmede » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 11:34 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #112

I did an exercise here: the average CEO salary of S&P 500 is around $20M. That's around $10B totally. Assume there are three executives - so thats around $30B annually. Lets go much further, lets multiply this by 10 to account for top 5000 companies (in practice it would be more like top 20,000 because the lower companies have much lower CEO salaries). There are around 300 million people in USA. By redistributing the…

$900 doesn't go a long way if you're buying cocaine or yacht time, but it goes pretty far at the grocery store. How about not eradicating it entirely, but taking enough to give $500 to everyone?

Re: CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations

#149

Post by danny_codes » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 11:34 PM UTC

Aunche wrote: post #95

I'd likely be progressive if American progressivism wasn't so economically illiterate (as opposed to say Piketty). The vindictive themes make me think that it's motivated more by envy than a genuine desire to improve society. The CEO to worker compensation ratio is a useless metric. There is absolutely no reason why Starbucks should be punished for hiring more workers over a company like Nvidia that hires relatively…

It’s a metric capturing income inequality. Very relevant to those of us who care about income inequality. There are plenty of reasons to want to limit income inequality.

Re: CEO pay and stock buybacks have soared at the largest low-wage corporations

#150

Post by Aurornis » Thu, Aug 21, 2025, 11:34 PM UTC

simianwords wrote: post #133

drunner wrote: post #118

Earlier quoted context omitted.

As shown by the covid payments. $900 a year is a lot of money to a lot of folks. Heck annual social security average is 24k a year, so you are talking about nearly 4% more money for just those people alone.

Fair, lets then count income tax which makes it more like $500 assuming net taxes around 40%. I'm ignoring salary increase due to stock valuation going up because it complicates things and there is equal force from both sides of the argument. So you decide: 20,000 companies running with a CEO being paid like an average person. And every citizen gets $500 in their account per year. Edit: its not just a CEO but the C s…

> So you decide: 20,000 companies running with a CEO being paid like an average person. And every citizen gets $500 in their account per year

In these contrived scenarios people will always choose the anti-CEO scenario.

You could restructure your hypothetical scenario such that the money was lit on fire instead of being paid to executives and you’d still find support from people who are just angry at executives getting paid a lot.