Apple just cut Tim Cook's pay by 40%. How ever will he get by on that $50m? Apple CEO Tim Cook's 2023 compensation package has been slashed by 40 percent, Apple said, after the iBoss okayed the move in response to shareholder criticism of executive pay. Apple said in its annual proxy statement filed with the SEC yesterday that Cook's total target compensation was being reduced to $49 million from the …
Admittedly, if you're in the mood to buy an island, such things are very expensive. You'll have to work for a few years on $40M a year to afford that. Why people want to buy islands is another question, but I don't know the answer to that one. I could think of stuff to do with hundreds of millions, but a lot of those things involve giving it away to people or organizations.
That's only his salary... what about options, benefits (health, dental and others), retirement. Chuck in all the free stuff like transportation, I doubt Tim's picking up the limo fare, or the plane tix, private or not... I'm sure that on the iphone cost to consumer pie chart graph, there's a slice that covers stuff like transportation and such.
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But the answer to your heart felt comment is to value the service worker more, not the bosses less, IMHO.
Nurses, doctors, teachers, care givers should all get bloody good wages. No argument.
How do we change society so it values the servant? Christians have been trying for 2000 years and failing badly.
We now have organised religion that institutionalises the same devaluation of the worth of service.
I don't know the answer, I just don't think paying the bosses less is going to fix the problem .
Setting a legal maximum multiplier between min and max is one possibility - if the CEO wants more money, gotta pay the peons more.
The two problems with that are that it needs very careful wording to prevent "special" corporate structures to evade the limit, and many politicians have very strong personal conflicts of interest as their donations come out of the very same excessive income that would be cut.
At least, until the revolution happens, and then it's too late. Historically, every violent revolution has been caused by an excessive disparity between the poorest and richest in society.
Not sure they've been trying that hard. After all, the Vatican is one of the richest places on the planet.
And the Catholic church has historically had dissentions in its ranks about the wealth of cardinals and such.
So it's more a case of "do as I say as not as I do" when the church is talking about Jesus being poor.
That is not, however, an excuse for paying one guy enough money per year to support 10,000 families. He's not doing the work of that many people.
Sure, his work is important and it is important that he know what to say, when and how to say it and to who. Those things are complicated and require an above-average intelligence, to be sure. But they're not worth $50 million a year - especially when that is on top of all the other stuff he gets.
I have downvoted you for two simple reasons: 1) some bosses make a very high contribution to an enterprise, unfortunately its often a negative one and 2) some of the service jobs (eg the wiping up vomit example) do require human flexibility so the can not be carried out by a robot but do not need skill. We should not be paying highly for non-skill jobs. Thinking about it that would downrate most politicians and bureaucrats pay.
There is something wrong but you appear to be looking at it wrongly. It's supply and demand and skills/knowledge. Physical effort is irrelevant because most of us are born capable of performing physical acts so you're not going to be paid anything special for the ability.
There are any number of people who can pick vegetables. You don't even need to be able bodied, you just need functioning arms and some way to move about the field. That means if one worker ups and leaves you can easily find another to take their place. And it's hardly a complicated job. It probably takes fifteen minutes at the most to train a replacement so the impact of one worker leaving is negligible meaning there isn't even much need to incentivise them to stay.
But there are a limited number of people who are capable of being a CEO and even fewer who have the knowledge and experience of Apple that Mr Cook does. His impact on the business is probably far reaching and there is quite a lot of need to encourage him to stay.
Whether there is several million $s of need is another matter (and I do think it's far too much). But comparing what he does and his renumeration v. a crop picker is not valid. You're not going to redress things by attempting an irrational and incorrect comparison like that.
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"But there are a limited number of people who are capable of being a CEO and even fewer who have the knowledge and experience of Apple that Mr Cook does. His impact on the business is probably far reaching and there is quite a lot of need to encourage him to stay."
And no shortage of deputy CEO's who'll jump in when Mr Cook finally gets sick of the job( and the constantly telling the press office not to talk to el-reg when it calls up)
Setting a maximum multiplier of the lowest paid in an organisation would seem the best way to approach the problem... but then we're up against the idea of paying CEOs in shares/options to avoid that ratio with the result that many C level execs view the share price of the company over any good leadership of said company.
There's certainly millions of people in the world who could do Tim Cook's job better than he does, and probably hundreds within Apple itself.
He's trivially replaceable - and shareholders need that to be true, as otherwise investing in Apple would be extremely risky - he could be taken ill or die at any moment.
There's certainly millions of people in the world who could do Tim Cook's job better than he does, and probably hundreds within Apple itself.
Are there? The chap runs a two trillion dollar company, and has proved that he actually can do it. Can you pick the next guy that can do it? With 100% certainty?
When Steve Jobs was shuffling off his mortal coil, there was a lot of speculation as to whether Cook could cut the mustard, or if he would be off the boil, being more of an accountant type than His Steveness's visionary type. Two trillion dollars is a lot of money to bet with, sure there might be someone better to do it, but what if you pick Elon 2.0? Two trillion becomes one trillion, and everyone is very unhappy. Better to pay Cook well and keep him happy.
Can you pick the next guy that can do it? With 100% certainty?
Oh, "with 100% certainty". Well, can you do anything with 100% certainty? Even reaching to scratch yourself, before completing the act, you could die of a cerebral hemorrhage or a nuclear strike take out your location. So NO, you are asking for something as ridiculous as my examples. Now, can somebody else do the job? Sure. the USA just had four execrable years of complete chaos under a toxic narcissist, an active threat to security, and it survived.
"Can you pick the next guy that can do it? With 100% certainty?"
No, but I can't say with 100% certainty that Cook won't break something in the next year. Any person is capable of making a stupid mistake, many of which seem plausible at the time. The history of companies doing something disastrous for them is long, and many of them don't look like guaranteed bad ideas when proposed. 100% certainty is impossible, but you know that already.
There's a difference between being a visionary who can successfully take a company from nothing to a moderate success, or even from a successful company to a behemoth, and someone who can avoid crashing an already successful company. Steve Jobs had to be the former twice, getting the initial Apple products sold and rescuing the weakened Apple in the 1990s. Even that wasn't all down to him, but he played an important role. Cook did not have that problem; Apple was massive in 2011 when he took control of it, and it's massive now. You're right that someone could pull a Musk and break anything, even something as successful as Apple, but it takes effort to be that bad, as we're seeing with each bad decision that Musk makes.
This isn't to say that Cook doesn't deserve the money he gets. I don't particularly care about that. Apple's got a bunch of cash and decides to give it at any level they choose. Nevertheless, Cook's neither a miracle-maker nor the only person who can operate Apple.
...stop buying Apple kit! I got nothing against Mr Cook or Apple, if they're happy to pay him whatever he asks and they have it in the bank, then that's their business.
I say all that as someone who last bought an Apple trinket about 15 years ago now. Their products are nice, certainly nice looking and they do actually work well but they're nothing that special and it took me spending a lot of money, and racking up some minor debts to realise that. iMacs, Macbooks, phones and tablets, the lot.
Nowadays instead of simply being a sheep and just buying what the ad men tell me to buy, I do proper research and find products that do what I need and give me value for money for the long term, not just keep on the treadmill.
I am actually less worried about the lad with the ball than the about the group of shady old men that get to decide in which dictatorship the lad will be kicking the ball next. Not to speak of the lords of the rings.
The lads (and ladies) with their balls will be kicked out of the game before reaching 40, with knackered bodies and little education. The shady old men get to continue their destructive games for life.
(edit:splling)
When you already have $1,700,000,000, what's the point to get a few millions more?
This World is insane. The world’s ten richest men own more wealth than the bottom 40 percent of humanity, 3.1 billion people.
Since the covid crisis, for every $1 won by the poorer 90%, each billionaire earned $1,700,000.
Redistribution of wealth is less and less assured. This was also a reason for the fall of the Roman Empire.
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