Steve Job's bonus may have been $43 million, but John Paulson made $3.7 billion in 2007 -- it's not an executive bonus, but I think that excessive compensation, regardless of structure, is what people get annoyed about.
These results are technically accurate, in that they cover "named executives for companies in the Russell 3000", but I think they're a bit misleading because (1) most hedge funds are not listed companies and (2) traders who get massive performance bonuses are typically not executives.
Exactly. Top hedge fund managers regularly make over a billion every year. Even last year, with the stock market meltdown, the 25 top earners made more than $11 billion.
Is this why people complain about the bonuses paid to bank executives, but not to people like Jobs?
It's apparent that Jobs has done a lot of hard work and made Apple successful, but banking is a black box to most people. I think there's a perception that banking execs go abuse the massive resources that their institutions possess to screw over other people, and get a bonus for it at the end of the day.
And maybe they do, but I suspect that there's a lot more to their jobs than that. And if their companies succeed, why shouldn't they be compensated? If the board is stupid enough to pay them such obscene amounts of money, then they'd be stupid not to take it.
The issue with banking bonuses is not that they are large, it is that they are given without regard to whether or not the short term success that gives rise to the bonus will result in long term distress for the bank. These externalities are particularly salient the larger the financial institution. You see those 'massive resources that their institutions possess...' belong, generally speaking, to others. Teachers and police officers, grocers and elderly women.
When financial institutions stumble in a long term sense, it directly affects the future financial security of millions of people. Taxpayers are then liable for large sums of the, essentially, pilfered resources. Police are public employees, their pensions have to be paid when the time comes regardless of how badly their pension fund has been raided. Ditto for teachers. And so on and so forth.
We should start thinking of CEOs as individuals who have been tasked with stewarding some amount of wealth, rather than individuals tasked with the running of a company. This is because Apple represents USD216 Billion in wealth. This wealth needs to be well managed, or there will be repercussions in the future.
> Police are public employees, their pensions have to be paid when the time comes regardless of how badly their pension fund has been raided. Ditto for teachers. And so on and so forth.
You write that like it's a law of physics or something. It isn't. There's absolutely no reason why public employees can retire using 401(k)s and the like. In fact, a lot of them do get much of their retirement benefits from 403(b)s, which are basically the same as 401(k)s.
In fact, pension funds, both public and private, are a huge mistake because underfunding and raiding can be, and is, hidden for decades.
And ultimately, that's for the board and investors to decide/influence.
Yes and no. The problem is, the executive is doing the work now, not in 5 or 10 years, and they're probably going to expect something for their efforts. If you delay too much of their compensation into the future, they'll get fed up and go work for another company that doesn't do it that way.
You could pay them up front with a clause that, if the company falters in some time frame, the executive (whether currently employed or not) owes some portion of the money back to the company--but there's no guarantee that you'll be able to collect from them. The executive could be dead, bankrupt, or have left the country.
And what if the economy blows up for some unrelated reason in five years, or some other external disaster strikes? Suddenly the company is doing terribly through no real fault of the executive, who is now stuck with not only having to find work in bad conditions but suddenly not getting paid for work he did over the last five years. What sensible executive is going to want to take that risk?
In general, there tends to be an incentive to push executive rewards closer to the short term, despite how much sense it seems to make that it should be the long-term view that matters, and regardless of how the shareholders may personally feel about it.
wow these numbers are amazing; Its hard to believe these men are worth the 20-30mm bonuses they received; then I saw the #1 (jobs) and thought / hmmmm I think he was instrumental in Apple's turn around so perhaps he was worth it...
Its just hard to say 1 person is worth 30mm in bonuses / but I guess capitalism disagrees.
edit: Also my thoughts were mostly conceived after I asked myself "How many people at these companies are underpaid and might leave because of such underpayment while these guys are perhaps overpaid and how will that affect the company's future"
I think it has a lot more to do with the power structure. These people have learned to use the companies for their own benefit, probably because the owners' power is diffuse.
These results are technically accurate, in that they cover "named executives for companies in the Russell 3000", but I think they're a bit misleading because (1) most hedge funds are not listed companies and (2) traders who get massive performance bonuses are typically not executives.
EDIT: "hedge funds are _not_ listed companies"