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Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

bbc.com

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Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#231

Post by ClumsyPilot »

avianlyric wrote: post #181
crispyambulance wrote: post #144

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> How many Tim Cook's do you have lying around? I think that's also silly calculation. Beyond a certain (admittedly unknowable) point, compensation becomes a meaningless number for the individual. Would Tim Cook "rage-quit" Apple if they could only pay him, say, 75 million instead of 750 million? If yes, then it's pure greed. If no, then it's too much. Is there something substantive behind that 750 million figure oth…

It’s shares and Apple’s market cap is 2.44 Trillion. Effectively shareholders paid 0.03cents on the dollar for Tim Cook. In exchange they get a steady ship that slowly and surely increases in value. Why quibble about such a small amount? You’ve paid 0.03% of your current Apple holdings for a decade of growth creating value many orders of magnitude greater.

Market cap is not a real sum of money that actually exists and coupd be retrieved. You, the sharegolder, oan the company, and pay Tim Cook out of revenue. From that perspective salaries of upper management are not so trivial

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#232

Post by ChuckNorris89 »

martyvis wrote: post #209
avianlyric wrote: post #166

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think this is ignoring the risks associated with such a change. You might find people qualified on paper, but you really don’t know how that translates into real world performance until you try it. The risk of getting that wrong and accidentally destroying billions of dollars of shareholder value (don’t like the term, but it seems appropriate here) is very high (low likelihood, extremely high severity). As a board…

>The risk of getting that wrong and accidentally destroying billions of dollars of shareholder value Definitely happened for HP when they took on Leo

And Yahoo.

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#233

Post by OJFord »

bserge wrote: post #221
TheOtherHobbes wrote: post #208

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't think anyone other than Tim could have done just as well. If you look at competing tech corps - HP, IBM, Sun, MIPS, SGI, DEC, Nokia, even MS - their run isn't as long, they fail to adapt after a strong start, and the wheels often come off in spectacular ways. And that's with competent management. (Let's not talk about the multiple management idiocies that happened at HP.) Apple is now one of the longest lived…

You sure it wasn't Jobs? Looks to me like Cook just kept things going about the same as Jobs would have (at least the last version of him). I do wonder how long it's gonna last.

I wouldn't have guessed (/remembered) it had been ten years of Cook, but what I do remember is people saying exactly that when he took over.

I suppose at some point all companies die/fade into obscurity/are different companies in all but name; maybe in 2080 or whatever we'll be able to say - ah, yep, knew it, Apple was for the dogs as soon as Jobs left, was only a matter of time!

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#234

Post by Bancakes »

rglullis wrote: post #59
beckman466 wrote: post #46

So according to this 2018 article by The Verge [1], Foxconn workers producing iGadgets in China earn on average $390.16 per month. Times that by twelve and we find that workers earn $4,681.92 per year on average. If we divide Tim's $750,000,000 bonus/payout this year by that $4,681.92 yearly Foxconn salary, we get 160,190 My question is: how is Tim so productive that he does roughly 160,000 people’s work, or 1/8th of…

When will we learn to stop making these silly calculations about "productivity" and understand that people are paid not by the value of their work, but by their scarcity? Any factory in China can replace most of their 160k employees overnight if they wanted to. How many Tim Cook's do you have lying around?

How many people can make predictable, iteratively improved products? The difficulty is in marketing.

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#235

Post by ClumsyPilot »

rglullis wrote: post #59
beckman466 wrote: post #46

So according to this 2018 article by The Verge [1], Foxconn workers producing iGadgets in China earn on average $390.16 per month. Times that by twelve and we find that workers earn $4,681.92 per year on average. If we divide Tim's $750,000,000 bonus/payout this year by that $4,681.92 yearly Foxconn salary, we get 160,190 My question is: how is Tim so productive that he does roughly 160,000 people’s work, or 1/8th of…

When will we learn to stop making these silly calculations about "productivity" and understand that people are paid not by the value of their work, but by their scarcity? Any factory in China can replace most of their 160k employees overnight if they wanted to. How many Tim Cook's do you have lying around?

"people are paid not by the value of their work, but by their scarcity"

When will we learn to stop making these silly arguments about "scarcity" and understand that the only thing that matters is a position of power?

Einstein and Steven Hawking were unique and advanced the entire human civilisation, whats their net work? Is anyone except the mentally ill going to suggest we have more Einsteins that Tim Cook's lying around?

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#236

Post by brk »

beckman466 wrote: post #46

So according to this 2018 article by The Verge [1], Foxconn workers producing iGadgets in China earn on average $390.16 per month. Times that by twelve and we find that workers earn $4,681.92 per year on average. If we divide Tim's $750,000,000 bonus/payout this year by that $4,681.92 yearly Foxconn salary, we get 160,190 My question is: how is Tim so productive that he does roughly 160,000 people’s work, or 1/8th of…

My question is: how is Tim so productive that he does roughly 160,000 people’s work, or 1/8th of Foxconn’s total workforce? [2] /s

My question is: if Tim Cook didn't exist, would any of those Foxconn workers have jobs?

My other questions is: if you put 160,190 Foxconn workers in front of 160,190 development environments, how long before they would randomly re-create the iPhone?

You can't compare salaries, or even value, of people at two massively different levels in the machine. Is Tim Cook "worth" more than 160,190 Foxconn workers? Apple's board and investors seem to think so, and they are Apple's ultimate "customer", being that it is a publicly traded company.

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#237

Post by rglullis »

UncleMeat wrote: post #186
rglullis wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If we were to live in a world where we are measured by our productivity, we would ALL be treated like the replaceable cogs from the Chinese factory.

Do you feel that your productivity as a trained professional is the same as anybody else's productivity? The trick would be to allow workers to capture all of their productivity rather than have a large amount of it syphoned off by owners.

> Do you feel that your productivity as a trained professional is the same as anybody else's productivity?

How would you even compare that? How would you even measure your productivity? Lines of code? Tickets closed?

We can't even compare "productivity" in our own "profession", much less between different ones.

Fuck, even to think in terms of "professions" today seems so anachronistic... some of the best people I worked with were never trained, should we disregard them and go back to a world of credentialism and guilds?

> The trick would be to allow workers to capture all of their productivity rather than have a large amount of it syphoned off by owners.

More likely, entrepreneurs would simply automate the shit of out of their work and outsource what is not automatable to other service providers. And all of the "workers" who can not think for themselves will be left jobless and crying for someone to help them.

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#238

Post by SantalBlush »

mombul wrote: post #88
Aeolun wrote: post #72

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> by their scarcity By their perceived scarcity Chances are that anyone other than Tim could have done just as well. Still, this is over 10 years, and Apple shares have increased in value by 1900%. If they were still the same value he’d have gotten 40M, for about 4M per year. Which is much more reasonable. I still think it’s high, but in line with what others get.

So the fact that Apple's share price has increased 1,200% since he took over is just a coincidence?

Apple's share price has increased more than 12,000% since Foxconn received its first order from Apple. Is that just a coincidence?

Re: Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

#240

Post by MikeLumos »

avianlyric wrote: post #210
MikeLumos wrote: post #170

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why does everyone think that they know better how to spend other people's money than the people who have earned it? Somehow the people who didn't have the intelligence and discipline to spend decades successfully doing things that make them rich are so sure that they would be able to do better with their (totally hypothetical) wealth than the people who did. Everyone loves to claim some kind of moral superiority over…

I don’t ones a ability to make money is even vaguely correlated with once ability to spend well for the benefit of society. Hell the whole reason why democracy is thing is because monarchies of yesteryear have proven quite decisively that the ability to raise capital and spend well for society are not even remotely linked. We need to consider very carefully as a society what the impact of the billionaire class has on…

The alternative to a billionaire deciding how to spend the money they have earned is a politician deciding to spend the money they didn't earn.

I trust a person who has generated billions of dollars worth of value over a buerocrat who won a popularity contest.

Besides, I don't think it should matter whether or not these people spend their money optimally. They've made this money, it's theirs. Don't take other people's stuff.

> We’ve already seen what more extreme individuals are prepared to do with that power.

Until we leave in a featureless dystopia where all people are perfect clones brought up in an identical environment, there will be power disparity between people. It can be based on inheritance (like in monarchies), or ability to commit violence, or charisma, or political skill, or ability to create value.

Between all these options, I'd much rather live in society where people get to keep the value they have created. It seems to me the most correlated with merit (not perfectly, but better than the alternatives), besides, it is morally right.

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