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

#261

Post by WalterBright » Sun, Aug 24, 2025, 7:45 AM UTC

thrance wrote: post #257

WalterBright wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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...

> Dividends are rightfully limited in their amount.

Not any more than buybacks are.

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

None of that automatically means your customer base will grow. Many, many companies fail at attempting just that.

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

#262

Post by biimugan » Sun, Aug 24, 2025, 3:29 PM UTC

WalterBright wrote: post #251

biimugan wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I'm not saying any schmuck could have done that. I'm saying that the engineers and managers at Apple (to use your example) are just as (if not more) responsible for the success than Jobs. Those lower-level engineers and managers also explain the repeated successes. And that, I would say, is the case in most market successes. The CEO is not remotely deserving of all the credit, or even most of the credit, in most situations. They don't really deserve to be paid what they're paid.

There's this certain anti-historical proclivity to create heroes for worship. Because it's a simple story to tell and it gives you the opportunity to put yourself in the hero's shoes. But the simple story is almost always wrong.

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

#263

Post by _DeadFred_ » Mon, Aug 25, 2025, 5:54 PM UTC

Workaccount2 wrote: post #239

_DeadFred_ wrote: post #236

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Telling the majority of our population they are dumb for engaging in our current social contract isn't going to work out well for society long term.

Those with a 1000x return almost universally recognize that they have the talent to not work for someone else. Or they do work for someone else, but make far, far, more than a house painter to do it. Those are probably less than 1% of the population. The majority don't even approach 2x, much less 1000x.

Then the 1000x return people should be smart enough to realize they are a small minority and not choose to alienate the much larger majority.