271–280 of 357 posts
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There really needs to be an upper limit on how much wealth a person is allowed to amass. Half a billion seems fair. After that the tax bracket needs to be taxed at 100%
It's also better for society, because it incentivizes people who produce more than average to keep producing. There's an optimum somewhere.
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To be clear, it's an accounting artifact, NOT what he actually makes per year -- as the rest of the sentence might clue the reader into: > which marked a staggering 3,474% increase from the previous year For whatever reason, Google pays their CEO using a "triennial" stock award. It vests over 3 years. So just to be accurate, his yearly compensation is more like $75 MM. Still obviously a lot of money for anyone, but n…
> So just to be accurate, his yearly compensation is more like $75 MM. But do you know he doesn't get a new "3 year vesting stock award" every year? It seems like he was paid 3% less the year before. That's normally the approach with vesting schedules like this, to stagger them, so there's never a "good time point" for him to leave.
That's the approach with rank-and-file employees, but not with the Google CEO, for whatever reason.
> Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was awarded compensation worth more than $225 million in 2022 I know this has been discussed here and 225MM is like the salary of 1000 employees making 200K for only one year, it is stock which is volatoile, that the salary of a CEO is impossible to measure, bla bla bla. But holy guacamole, whatever is the angle I look at it 225MM pear year does not make any f_ing sense to me and it is si…
I worked for a guy a decade ago who spent 8-10 years building a company to sell it for $300-400 million and he hasn't worked a day since. Owns a 30k acre ranch that a bunch of friends/family live on. Learjets. Villas in the islands, things like that. I can't think of one thing he hasn't done or is limited financially in doing. Last time I saw him he had a $120k watch on, some type of Hublot big bang. And Pichai gets…
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I share that intuition, although I don't see any reason to trust the intuition of an outside (either myself or presumably yourself) making 2 second back-of-envelope calculations of that of the Alphabet board.
Outrageous claims require commensurate evidence. Human factors easily explain why these hierarchical social structures produce wealth concentration.
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Sundar, like many other Google insiders, almost certainly has so much money he could just retire and live a life of luxury if he wanted to. And almost certainly he could probably choose a position within Alphabet with less responsibility like Chief Product Officer. To me it’s almost certainly a matter of the founders thinking he’s the best person in the world for the job of CEO and paying him a ton to justify the res…
A 200 person swe org is not 200MM/year of cost at google
You can look at public numbers to see that Google's revenue per __global__ employee is about 1.5 M and of that about 400 k is net income. SWEs in California make a lot more than the average global employee.
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People for whom being an important executive is at least almost as important as having as much money as they can reasonably consume. Certainly there’s a vast range of FIRE styles and even what constitutes retirement but at some level it’s a combination of keeping score, feeling valued relative to peers (see also sports), and the industry recognition.
In other words: ego. Executives exist to play a game of ego.
Most people have egos. Some more than others. And public recognition via titles matters a lot for future opportunities. (Though maybe you don't care much about that so long as you make enough money.)
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
When Ford went public around 1956, the man who ran that got $250,000, about $2.8 million today, with much higher taxes than today. But he also got a thank you letter from Henry Ford II, so he had that going for him. That was the largest IPO at the time, very complicated. I believe all the shares offered publicly were held by the Ford Foundation, for complicated tax and dynastic reasons. But the main point here is how…
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…
> Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was awarded compensation worth more than $225 million in 2022 I know this has been discussed here and 225MM is like the salary of 1000 employees making 200K for only one year, it is stock which is volatoile, that the salary of a CEO is impossible to measure, bla bla bla. But holy guacamole, whatever is the angle I look at it 225MM pear year does not make any f_ing sense to me and it is si…
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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.
Jobs turned 90-days-bankruptcy Apple into the wealthiest company in the world.