
It’s Never Been Easier to Be a CEO, and the Pay Keeps Rising - wintercarver
https://www.nytimes.com/2019/05/24/business/highest-paid-ceos-2018.html
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gervase
I feel like it's a little disingenuous to list unexercised stock and option
grants as part of the overall compensation, since these are directly related
to the future performance of the company itself (as led by the listed CEO,
presumably). I would have liked to see the option to differentiate between
total compensation more granularly, including by exercised grants.

I understand that that "2.3 billion" number makes for shocking value and
therefore a great headline, supporting the narrative that they're looking to
construct, but the way the raw data is presented actively obfuscates readers
from exploring the data and forming their own interpretations.

When I see a dataset with a 4 _million_ percent increase YOY, I would probably
classify that as an outlier, not as the representative value I report for the
whole dataset.

Edit: That's not to say their narrative is wrong (that is, CEOs may absolutely
be overpaid), just that the way they presented it feels misleading to me.

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Sohcahtoa82
Agreed.

On a similar note, I bring thing this kind of thing up whenever people talk
about how much money Jeff Bezos has.

While Bezos has a lot of cash for sure, he doesn't have $160B like news
headlines make it out to be. Most of his "money" is tied up in stocks, and if
he were to try to cash out all of it, it would tank the stock prices pretty
hard, and he'd only get a fraction of it.

~~~
paxys
No one is saying Bezos has $160B in cash. At that level liquid cash doesn't
really matter anyways, since there's no way you could even spend that much.

What he does have, though, is $160B worth of _influence_ , a large part of
which comes from the money tied up in stocks.

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iscrewyou
CEOs should be able to get paid how much ever the company/the board/the stock
holders are ok with paying them. No limit.

BUT that pay should be linked to the pay of everyone else in the company: the
average pay or the minimum pay or whatever have you.

I think the point gets lost in the fairness. It’s fair to pay them more for
their hard work. But it’s not fair to pay the CEO enormous sums while the
employees struggle.

~~~
mdorazio
Why should it be tied to other employees’ compensation? Fairness and
capitalism-based business generally don’t go together. That kind of thinking
leads to all kinds of problems. For example, is it fair for an employee to
jump ship for a higher salary offer elsewhere and leave their coworkers to
pick up the pieces? Is it fair for some employees to make more than others
just because they're better at negotiating? Is it fair that software engineers
make several times as much as teachers just because the thing they're good at
happens to be in high demand right now? I would say no.

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briandear
> Is it fair that software engineers make several times as much as teachers
> just because the thing they're good at happens to be in high demand right
> now? I would say no.

I disagree. Nobody forced anyone to be a teacher: people have chosen that job
knowing full well they’d make less money than an engineer. People aren’t
assigned careers like they were in a the Soviet Union: they pick what they
want to do. I used to be a photojournalist. The pay sucked so I ended up doing
software. Nothing is stopping a teacher from making similar choices. People
complain about the pay, but they keep joining lower paid professions. It’s
supply and demand.

~~~
gremlinsinc
yeah maybe it would be better if everyone were just paid the same regardless
of job, as long as they put in a 30 or 40 hour week. Why is one person more
valuable because they went to school isn't all life valuable? how mad would
you be if you went to starbucks and had to make your own coffee?

Shouldn't everyone at least have enough for the basic necessities in life if
they're willing to work (at anything not just professional jobs).

So while nobody is forcing people to work x job for shitty pay, I don't see
how just because someone is famous or a CEO that warrants being paid 500x
anyone else. There's a lot of shitty CEO's who definitely aren't worth 500x a
software a developer, yet there they are making it regardless because the rich
lookout for the rich.

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lacker
If it's never been easier to be a CEO, perhaps the author should consider it.
It's the easiest job title to legitimately acquire. You just need to pay a few
hundred bucks to incorporate in Delaware, and boom, you're a CEO.

~~~
tareqak
Hi 'lacker,

I detected a note of sarcasm in your response, but I don't have sufficient
context to decipher its meaning myself. Given that you were a founder for two
YC companies as it says in your HN profile, could you please explain what you
are implying?

I skimmed the article: it gives pretty good details on the arguments that it
is trying to make. The one thing I would change would be the headline to read
"It’s Never Been Easier to Be a Fortune 500 / Unicorn C.E.O., and the Pay
Keeps Rising" to reflect the specific kind of CEO that the article author
talks about.

~~~
astrea
I think they're rather offended by the diminishing title (although I
personally didn't read it that way).

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11thEarlOfMar
I'd like to see a little balance in this piece. Author includes no input from
the CEOs and no evidence of the ease of the job. It's essentially a listing of
the compensation of a variety of high-paid CEOs.

Moreover, the _median_ CEO pay in the US is $160k [0]. Perhaps there's a
little confirmation bias in this article.

[0]
[https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Chief_Executive_Off...](https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Chief_Executive_Officer_\(CEO\)/Salary)

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rayssgyms
Before jumping to the conclusion that the author is hoping you jump to,
question: is it possible that he, you, and I don’t have a full view of the
rare personality traits and skills that are required to be an effective
Fortune 50 CEO?

I assume most of us here are in favor for exchanging money for value (versus
time contributed)? Correct? Otherwise, how is a $200k SW engineer’s salary
justifiable compared to a $30k fast food worker’s? In the same 40 hour work
week?

I do take issue with non-founding CEOs [sometimes] having no skin in the game.
I saw this when I was at BlackBerry. Win or lose, the CEO that replaced the
founders would win. BlackBerry lost, he didn’t. This seems like a misalignment
of incentives, but that’s up to the company to address, not me, and hopefully
not the government. If the company gets the incentives wrong, they lose, and
hopefully we learn.

Back to the point: if a company has an impact on billions of dollars and
millions of lives, I’d prefer their leader be paid well. But my preference is
irrelevant here because a company can and should decide how to value that
person’s role. In contrast, I certainly wouldn’t want a government policy (and
it’s guaranteed slew of unintended consequences) regulating how much a chief
executive is paid.

Being an effective CEO is anything but easy. And the combination of an
effective CEO’s skills and experience are extraordinarily rare. It’s not a
surprise that the market prices their value accordingly.

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minikites
Once you get to a certain level of success in the business world, you can't
fail. CEOs who run a business into the ground easily find work leading other
companies. CEOs who commit crimes almost never get punished. There's a serious
issue with "moral hazard" because they can't fail or be punished.

~~~
lostlogin
> Once you get to a certain level of success in the business world, you can't
> fail. CEOs who run a business into the ground easily find work leading other
> companies.

There are other paths too, like going on to lead countries.

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legitster
Is there any reason we aren't taxing capital gains at the same rate as income?

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tathougies
Because it was already taxed at the same rate as income when it was earned as
profit by the company. Taxing it again when its realized means it was taxed
once when the corporation earned it, and then again when the individual stock
holder realized it. Now you may think that's how it should, but that issue of
double taxation is why capital gains tax is less than income tax.

An alternative is to 'flip' the tax. Tax companies at the rate of capital
gains, and investors at their tax bracket 'normal' rate. This also leaves more
capital for companies to reinvest.

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reasonablemann
There's no way CEOs deserve the pay they get. They cannot be that much better
than the other management. Shareholders are fleeced.

~~~
paxys
I'd say it's regular employees that are getting fleeced the most. We are in
the middle of perhaps the greatest economic boom the country has seen, and yet
wages have been flat for decades.

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lrem
Welcome to neofeudalism?

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briandear
Why is CEO pay the business of anyone except the Board of Directors?

Why don’t we critique successful actors or athletes for their high pay? The
cast of Friends made a million dollars per episode. And they didn’t even make
decisions, they literally read lines and made facial expressions at
appropriate moments. Certainly the editor and camera operators worked
“harder.”

~~~
rubyn00bie
It's the business of the shareholders first and foremost. The board of
directors and CEO have ZERO reason to think anything related to executive
compensation won't be made public.

If the company is public, then the company has the obligation to truthfully
and accurately represent itself to prospective shareholders (who can be
anyone, i.e. "the public").

CEO is a very different role than athlete or actor, from responsibility to
elasticity of demand for their labor and I think comparing the two is a false-
dichotomy.

Edit: What you're bringing up is actually one of the cruxes of our problems
here in America, management no longer owns any significant portion of the
company they manage. There is almost zero incentive to behave in a way that
promotes long-term success; instead, it's better to optimize for quarterly
returns so you hit your bonuses and eventually move on leaving all the shit to
the next person.

When ownership of a business has no power over its management, bad things
happen.

