Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Apple chief executive Tim Cook gets $750m payout

bbc.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

331–340 of 360 posts

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

#331

Post by therealdrag0 »

Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #189

When will the people understand, that if you force the equality, it'll result in mediocrity? USSR has learned this lesson the hard way, so it is sad to see how many well-off Americans a rushing head first into it voluntarily? Trust me, you won't like the results. You have a 200square meters house? Nobody needs that many space, and also there are so many homeless in Los Angeles. You take two rooms 24square meters each…

There are cultural factors as well.

IIRC there are places (Japan?) where it had historically been considered more unseemly for CEOs to get paid so much more than everyone else below them. But there’s no law of nature that says low performance goes with that.

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

#332

Post by therealdrag0 »

whack wrote: post #35

> In 2015, Mr Cook said he would give away his entire fortune before he dies, and is known to have donated tens of millions of dollars to charity. I'm normally a proponent of reducing income inequality. But this has got me thinking. Is the world actively better off when billionaires like Cook/Gates/Buffett make a ton of money. Consider the alternative: someone in the 75th percentile of USA income gets a fat raise. Mo…

If the middle class don’t have money to spend, then that would create more needy people cuz there won’t be jobs. Be careful of trade offs

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

#333

Post by effingwewt »

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?

Nothing about any CEO is special other than they haooened to land in the cushiest gig known to man. They effectively just suck all the money out as opposed to the people quite literally making the products.

I can't wait until we are over this hump and our future selves are like 'fuck how stupid were we to let one asshole sit at the top and do nothing but PR while we all beat each other ober the scraps.'

See the rich have figured out that if you pay people almost enough to live they will spend their lives surviving and won't have time to look up and realize what's happening.

Love how you put productivity in quotes as if it's up for debate, and math is now plain silly as it goes against your narrative? Top class.

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

#334

Post by DSingularity »

bzbarsky wrote: post #294
DSingularity wrote: post #218

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think if we go heavy handed against wealth inequality then we should also legislate conservative spending by governments. This money can’t go to the fund next Afghanistan or to Israel to fund another settlement. It has to go to simple but surely-helpful efforts like: feeding the poor, improving education, and building infrastructure.

Both improving education and building infrastructure, as they are actually practiced, are not "simple" and questionably "surely-helpful". See also bridges to nowhere and schools with top-of-the-line computers but broken heating/cooling systems. Just throwing money at things does not mean it gets used to actually improve them, unfortunately... The question is when you have gotten to diminishing, or negative, returns.

So what’s the alternative? If you are unwilling to build schools for the poor. If you are unwilling to build water cleaning stations for the poor. If you are unwilling to build them libraries and parks. Then you are basically willing to let them live as third class citizens. We need to recognize this.

In my opinion the whole “throwing money at the problem is not a solution” excuse is not enough to justify maintaining status quo. Yes, I agree, governments are the worst at efficient spending. Wasted money. Unjustified spending. Corruption. Nonetheless, we have a problem that must be solved.

If the wealthy have a better idea that involves no money being spent — great. But let’s not pretend like the human cost is going to go on pause while we debate this. Impoverished children will continue to live and grow in environments that do not help them to break out of poverty. What is worse is that the odds are getting worse for them because disparities are getting larger.

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

#335

Post by bidirectional »

LandR wrote: post #230
rglullis wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Tim Cook's do you have lying around? I don't think these people are as special and rare as you think they are. There are plenty of smart people on the planet.

This reward was defined ten years ago. By definition, Tim Cook is unique in that he has successfully run Apple for ten years. The risk of taking on a new CEO is orders of magnitude greater than 750mn.

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

#336

Post by crispyambulance »

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.

> Why quibble about such a small amount?

I am not quibbling about THAT amount.

I am quibbling about the fact that he (like other tycoons) sits on top of a giant pyramid of human labor, the majority of which earns just enough to make ends meet in a low cost of living country.

Sure, Tim Cook is a good person and deserves reward for what he has done and it should be "a hellava lot". At some point, however, that reward starts becoming absurd and nonsensical.

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

#337

Post by R0b0t1 »

djbebs wrote: post #22
R0b0t1 wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

A judge is also unlikely to assume the randos on a board are better at upholding fiduciary duty than the company executive. The case that created this BS is one where Henry Ford said literally nothing in his defense and lost.

What are yoy talking about? The "randos" on the board are the ones representing the shareholders...

Yes, but are they subject matter experts? The CEO is more likely to be an expert than they are, that's why the CEO is the CEO. The board members' only qualification is having money.

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

#338

Post by crispyambulance »

voisin wrote: post #190
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…

> If yes, then it's pure greed. If no, then it's too much. I think these numbers are set by compensation committees of the Board of Directors using consultants that analyze other private and public company data. So if you have some small number of greedy individuals pushing for massive compensation based on stock performance, then that trickles through the industry. Cook doesn’t have to be greedy to just not want to…

> It is a race to the top. Solvable via regulation if anyone really cared, but I suspect no one really does.

Well put. I suppose no one cares enough because, after all, there aren't THAT MANY billionaire tycoons. And, sure, they perform a valuable function in putting many people to work and giving away millions of turkeys on thanksgiving, etc.

But now, we're in an era of billionaires racing each other into space and compensation levels which are "astronomical". It's in some ways a repeat of the age of robber-barons except I don't see it slowing down any time soon. Now I wonder what ended "the gilded age" ~100 years ago? Oh yeah, world war + economic crash.

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

#339

Post by SideQuark »

UncleMeat wrote: post #192
ChrisLomont wrote: post #110

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is that moral failing related to jealously about how others choose to spend money that isn't theirs?

Money is not gifted to people by God. It is allocated to people by systems that society chooses. The idea of the specific "rightful" ownership of money we have today is not universal throughout history and can change.

> It is allocated to people by systems that society chooses

Exactly. And history is pretty clear that nearly everyone is worse off when society decides how to spend money instead of letting owners decide how to spend money. It's why every first world economy has a massive dose of capitalism and a tiny dose of socialism in their GDP. And why a significant part of the worst economies of the world don't.

>The idea of the specific "rightful" ownership of money we have today is not universal throughout history

Yet the poor (and pretty much everybody else too) in most of the world, if not all, today are vastly richer than the poor of the past.... Maybe there's a reason the world has moved away from the economic systems of the past?

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

#340

Post by Andrew_nenakhov »

UncleMeat wrote: post #195
Andrew_nenakhov wrote: post #112

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm from former USSR and I can hardly stand this commie foolishness. Go to some socialist country like Cuba, Venezuela that have eliminated the inequality (like the USSR did before), then talk about 'moral failings of the society'.

The USSR was an authoritarian hellscape. Most states in history have been that way. I am not convinced that deregulated capitalism is the only way to achieve non-authoritarian rule.

At the end of it's life, USSR wasn't a hellscape. It was a land of bored disillusioned people who knew the futility of trying, because the outcome was always fixed
Post reply on HN