It's simple to say we'd be more charitable if we had incomes 1,000x or more our current annual compensation, but I do genuinely wonder if I'd be different. Would I be greedy, would I care about doing right to the laid off employees-- it's hard to imagine how crossing that bridge might change people.
I'm not going to try to justify how I would act, or how anyone else should act, were I to have a compensation package putting me easily in the top 0.1% of society, but we can collectively dispense with the notion that certain types of compensation (i.e. stocks) must necessarily be prohibitively harder for a CEO to give up than just money.
The CEO of Robinhood would need to file a public form with the SEC if he wanted to sell any of his shares. People watch that and say "hmmm, why is the CEO of Robinhood wanting to sell shares? I wonder what he knows that we don't" and the stock goes down on that information.
Stock is absolutely more difficult to liquidate for a CEO.
I think by example we can guess that you might act exactly that way (since so many other people do) but IMO the important thing is how do we as a society want people to act (ITT it would not be how this person is acting).
IMO we as a society should pass rules and laws to prevent people from acting this way ie limits on compensation.
It's probably not that simple. Most chief executives delegate the responsibility of hiring staff to others. Sure, the buck stops with the executive, but ultimately nobody can review every single operational decision at scale. Maybe they hired for a world where the pandemic didn't happen and the monetary supply didn't tighten, then the world changed.
The entire purpose of the C-suite is to stay on top of macro level stuff, and its the boards purpose to make sure the C-suite is doing it. They didn't do their job. And they got rich not doing it.
What CEO doesn't approve overall hiring numbers? If you're worth paying millions upon millions of dollars a year, shouldn't you have capital-F Foresight?
Or is it more that most public-company CEOs are probably not playing above replacement level?
That's insider trading, and a whole different accusation than the one levied above, which is implying some sort of wealth inequality issue that executives are compensated in stocks and non-executives are compensated in cash.
Frustrating to see the incredibly common conflation of equity and salary. Even though it’s always correctly suffixed with “compensation”, people assume that means “a bank account with 8 zeros”.
That's because it effectively is. I suggest you look into pledged asset lines (and more broadly 'buy, borrow, die'), which are even more tax advantaged than just getting paid directly. Sure, there is some marginal cost associated with borrowing against granted equity, but it's almost certainly less than 10%. So yes, it is accurate to assume that if an exec vets $x00 million dollars of equity a year, they have a high percentage of that available to spend on whatever consumption or investment they desire.
Quite possibly the best comment in this thread. Some people are quick to say that the high on-paper number doesn't mean anything, but remain (in most cases wilfully) blind to the fact that the low on-paper number doesn't mean anything either. As you point out, the real number is unknown and often not fixed but for all practical purposes probably still way higher than most of us will ever experience.
It's even more bizarre/frustrating for someone, especially in tech where many of our TC is largely RSUs, not understand that wealth is almost never held in cash.
When I was young (and poor) I also believed that being rich meant having Scrooge McDuck piles of cash to swim in.
After my first big RSU payout I quickly realized that nobody with more than a few 100k in assets keeps anything close to the majority of them in cash. Savings accounts are for the poor. Anyone, even in the every day millionaire level, keeps most of their wealth in non-cash investments, leaving only enough cash to cover crisis situations. Especially with inflation this high, holding cash is literally throwing money away.
Nobody has a bank account with 8 zeros, except maybe lottery winners that never learned the basics of asset management.
Canonically according to Rosa the money bin is just his “personal memento” cash - the money he earned by hand and remembers every bit of. It’s only a portion of his fortune.
That's not really true, at least not in the same way being discussed above. Jobs already owned millions of shares in Apple stock, so yes, he profited from the stock but AFAIK that was only from the appreciation of existing stock, not from new grants.
