221–230 of 357 posts
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Jobs and Nadella certainly did contribute more than 1000x the labor of a [...] employee.
How? Jobs did have some original ideas, but it's not like NeXT was a resounding success on its own that toppled Apple & Microsoft. Being the ideas guy is different than the implementation guy, and in some cases he was neither.
I am extremely skeptical that at the higher levels of CEO pay there is any marginal utility. I just don’t think the improved management quality you get from an additional $1M is actually making the company more than $1M in profits. Seems like a failure of markets
$1mm/year is such a drop in the bucket for a company making $100,00mm/year it almost doesn’t matter. It’s not about the marginal benefits of paying the same guy just a tiny bit more anyhow, it’s about paying that guy enough that he doesn’t just decide to retire, or run a competing company, or start his own. Imagine if you think some guy is the most qualified person in the world to run your company, even if they only…
Yes, we would lose some synergies, but we would gain in terms of a more equitable society. Sometimes more stuff is not better.
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Sundar Pichai managed many successful Google products before he became CEO.
What were they? Aren't most core Google products on rails, even getting slightly worse over time? And the non-core products just get buried in the desert.
It's become tiresome, reading things that pretend this is not business as usual.
If I kicked a puppy every day for 20 years, it would be “business as usual" if I were to kick a puppy today. That doesn't make it okay to kick puppies.
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To add on to this, unbridled capitalism also leads to more goods and services affordable for the average consumer. This makes the idea of taking a lower paying job appealing because you can still live a fairly comfortable life.
Is it unbridled that accomplishes that? Before regulations and unions people worked more hours per week, even children, and were exploited to a criminal degree. Mostly the profits went to capital owners. Collective assets like the environment suffered. Progress was certainly made and highly visible, yet at great cost.
probably not the best example, today this is much worse vs. during the early days of the Industrial Revolution
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That is a very narrow and frankly sweepingly incorrect description of "CEOs" or "companies". They're not all the same. I for one (alongside many other investors) carefully study incentive programs and compensation oversight executed by the board of directors. There are many thoughtful companies (and CEOs) who e.g. align over very long-term targets, such as '5 year return on capital". Investors have found out a long t…
Are you a CEO of a public company or still private? There is a huge difference in incentives from institutional shareholder pressure.
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Exactly. It's more accurate to say "we look at long term as long as the short term stock price also looks good".
Do you all not understand that the stock price reflects the long term prospects of the company? It’s literally priced in
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That is a very narrow and frankly sweepingly incorrect description of "CEOs" or "companies". They're not all the same. I for one (alongside many other investors) carefully study incentive programs and compensation oversight executed by the board of directors. There are many thoughtful companies (and CEOs) who e.g. align over very long-term targets, such as '5 year return on capital". Investors have found out a long t…
>Very long term >5 years That is so laughably short sighted that you could not have given a better example as to why CEOs are all the same.
I'm tired of capitalism. The less it's regulated, the more it opens the road to planned economy or tightly managed socialism. I'm glad I live in Europe. At least I can just retreat from this system with welfare and still eat and have a roof. Every time alternatives to capitalism are brought up, every time people come and say Stalin was worst than Hitler. It's impossible to discuss change or alternatives.
>I'm glad I live in Europe.
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There are many players who don't live up to their $100MM+ contracts. I fail to understand why physicality should be relevant to high compensation.
Physicality is far more measurable in its results than the product of a thousands strong multi-national company. In other words one can pretty clearly attribute the performance of an athlete to said athletes talents and ability. In the case of the CEO making the same money, it's much harder to measure their performance, and even harder to attribute the success of the company to their direct performance. This point be…
That doesn’t mean that their performance can’t significantly affect their companies stock price to a much higher degree than similarly paid athletes could.
> Physicality is far more measurable
Who cares. Do you believe that only people whose output could be precisely measured should be highly compensated?
Of course there is a lot of inefficiency considering Pichai seems to be a very poor CEO who’s quite replaceable.