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

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

#251

Post by WalterBright »

biimugan wrote: post #232
WalterBright wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Maybe this is the self correction. Consider the various CEOs of Apple. Some drove it to near bankruptcy, Jobs drove it to the richest company in the world. Same company, same employees. The only difference was leadership. Consider also what happened to MSFT when Nadella took over. Same company, same employees, dramatically different results. As a shareholder of Microsoft and Apple, I am happy with their CEO compensat…

> The only difference was leadership. That's quite the leap though, and is just confusing correlation and causation. Maybe the previous leadership was simply getting in the way of the engineers and managers that had the good ideas. And the new leadership was more hands-off, or focused in other areas like marketing. Or those cases are just flukes. For every case like the ones you cite, I could find two where the exact…

Jobs created 3 fortunes. One you could attribute to luck. Two is getting hard to say any schmuck could have done that. 3 means Jobs was a unicorn.

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

#252

Post by ivewonyoung »

conradev wrote: post #219
ivewonyoung wrote: post #196

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That was considered a tax loophole by the last administration so the R&D exception was allowed to expire in 2022 and only recently restored by the new admin.

R&D tax credits did not “expire". Immediate expensing expired in 2022, requiring companies to split credits across multiple years. Multiple attempts since then have tried to restore expensing (often in bipartisan tax packages), but Congress hasn’t passed a permanent fix.

> but Congress hasn’t passed a permanent fix

The new admin just did that last month in the Big Beautiful Bill.

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

#253

Post by Aunche »

whoknowsidont wrote: post #248
Aunche wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You made a lot of loaded assumptions, the most objectively wrong one being that I was conservative. "I'd likely be progressive if American progressivism wasn't so economically illiterate (as opposed to say Piketty)" means that I share similar values as progressives, but think that all of them in my home country are a joke.

> the most objectively wrong one being that I was conservative. Where? No one has stated anything. Everything has been a _direct_ response to your own words.

> Where?

> I'm not sure your statement can be read any other way than "I don't like perspectives that disagree with my primed and preconceived beliefs"

You could have read the second half of the comment which explains why I think progressives are economically illiterate and an example of a non economically illiterate policy.

> For decades, professional American economists vote for the democratic party at a rate greatly exceeding the general population

This assumes that I'm not Democrat. Maybe it's partially at fault for not being clear about what progressive means, but again the rest of the comment would not sense with this assumption.

> there's also something to say about how people invoke the term "economics" in their own personal posts as some sort of grandstanding dog-whistle

A dog whistle for what?

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

#254

Post by AtlasBarfed »

simonsarris wrote: post #205
sfifs wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What makes you think a typical corporate board actually acts in the interest of its shareholders?

??? Because the typical corporate board usually owns an awful lot of shares, and the c-suite is often largely paid in shares. The second part of this article is about stock buybacks for a reason. There is really no doubt that they are sensitive to shareholders here.

Go check out how the Tesla board functions, who is on it, how they got there, and how they could be removed.

Musk has his cronies on the board, and the rules to replace someone on the board effectively require 80+% of the stock not owned by Elon to change.

The members of this board got huge stock grants from Musk and are utterly beholden to him.

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

#255

Post by ryandrake »

WalterBright wrote: post #250
ryandrake wrote: post #234

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only difference was leadership. Not really. There are a lot of external factors that could explain the difference in the company's performance. Different time, different customers, different overall market strength, different availability in capital, different interest rates. You can't pin the company's success or failure entirely on the CEO, and there is not that much correlation between CEO compensation and c…

Nadella changed the focus and direction of Microsoft. The company increased in value 10x. Maybe "anyone could have done that", in hindsight. Heck, if I went back in time with a detailed copy of Apple's history, I could have done what Jobs did. But without that guide, I would have destroyed Apple. I'm just not that good.

All I am saying is we don't know that it was his decisions that caused the value increase and not something else, and we can't know because we can't do a controlled experiment in another otherwise identical universe to rule out other factors.

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

#256

Post by WalterBright »

ryandrake wrote: post #255
WalterBright wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Nadella changed the focus and direction of Microsoft. The company increased in value 10x. Maybe "anyone could have done that", in hindsight. Heck, if I went back in time with a detailed copy of Apple's history, I could have done what Jobs did. But without that guide, I would have destroyed Apple. I'm just not that good.

All I am saying is we don't know that it was his decisions that caused the value increase and not something else, and we can't know because we can't do a controlled experiment in another otherwise identical universe to rule out other factors.

In order to increase the market cap of the company by 10x over 10 years, he would have had to have consistently made the best decision.

Being dumb luck seems highly unlikely.

If you can show me an incompetent CEO who presided over such success, I'd enjoy hearing about it.

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

#257

Post by thrance »

WalterBright wrote: post #249
thrance wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Stock buybacks is sacrificing the long term. It's artificially inflating the stock price with money that should have been used to grow the company. And speculators don't care about any of that while the line is going up. They're not stupid, they just don't care about the actual health of the company, since today it is almost completely decorellated from its share price. Look at Tesla and tell me why the investors hav…

> It's artificially inflating the stock price with money that should have been used to grow the company. Stock buybacks (and dividends issued) are done when the company does not have a better use for the money. Are you also opposed to dividends?

Dividends are rightfully limited in their amount. Buybacks are a way to bypass this limitation, and used to be legally grey until they were fully legalized sometime in the 1980s.

> when the company does not have a better use for the money.

I think that's nonsense, you can always pay your talent better, invest in new equipment, diversify your offerings...

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

#258

Post by _DeadFred_ »

missedthecue wrote: post #243
_DeadFred_ wrote: post #238

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You realize minimum wage workers have to meet metrics, right? So he should be paid more for... doing the job like minimum wage workers do?

yes I realize that, I worked a minimum wage job for a long time. The CEO has daily job requirements to meet too, and for that the Starbucks CEO receives a cash salary of about $5m a year. This publication should use that for the ratio, rather than pulling forward the next three years of RSUs that only vest if he hits extremely broad strategy dependent goals that can easily be sunk because of a pandemic or general eco…

The CEO has NOTHING like the metrics held to the feet of a minimum wage worker who doesn't have the cushion to handle missing one paycheck.

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

#259

Post by whoknowsidont »

Aunche wrote: post #253
whoknowsidont wrote: post #248

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> the most objectively wrong one being that I was conservative. Where? No one has stated anything. Everything has been a _direct_ response to your own words.

> Where? > I'm not sure your statement can be read any other way than "I don't like perspectives that disagree with my primed and preconceived beliefs" You could have read the second half of the comment which explains why I think progressives are economically illiterate and an example of a non economically illiterate policy. > For decades, professional American economists vote for the democratic party at a rate great…

You are still not answering the question lol.

>This assumes that I'm not Democrat.

No it doesn't. It's not even about you? English seems like your first language so I can't help but feel there's something else going on here.

You're just being a troll at this point. Goodbye.

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

#260

Post by selinkocalar »

This is exactly why I believe in building companies that actually create value, not just extract it. We could easily charge enterprise prices and hire armies of consultants to inflate our costs. Instead, we focus on making compliance genuinely affordable for the companies that need it most. The best businesses solve real problems efficiently. When you're spending millions on CEO compensation while your workers can't afford basic necessities, you're not solving problems - you're creating them.
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