Top 20 CEO pay in the S&P 500 is disgusting
Ranked: The Highest Paid CEOs in the S&P 500
If Ryan Cohen took a salary in that leauge the bear thesis would still be alive and the turnaround of GameStop might never happen (or be significantly delayed). My executive chairman has other plans 🙌
Google ceo making 870 thousand dollars per day. I'm sure he generates more than that in profit personally right
Their daily revenue is like $200M. Of course revenue isn't profit but still that's less than half of one percent
They have more than 200 employees and also expenses
My takeaway is "how the hell is Simon in the top 20??" Have you been to a Simon property lately? Shit's dying and their properties are being leased as Amazon distro centers.
Just want to say this based on your comment OP: just be aware that you’re holding a bag for GME at this point. It’s been almost 3 years and it’s now at… $17, which adjusted for pre-split is $68. It’s very unlikely there’ll ever be a squeeze like the Jan 2021 squeeze ever again.
With that out of the way, CEOs are overpaid for work anybody with half a brain can do. All a CEO does is make decisions, and if they’re good, they’d ask the other executive members to do the actual work and analysis. I’m fairly certain you could have an AI take over their jobs and nothing would change at worst - and it’s more likely that it would actually improve some businesses.
I won't be citing sources, sine I am not trying to convince you, but I will say this:
GME did not squeeze in 2021, it was running into a gamma squeeze, but was shut down by the 'removal' of the buy button.
Since then, shorts have not closed and shorting continues on a daily basis.
This year it seems like GameStop will have a profitable year, EPS was very nearly 0 last quarter and will most likely be positive the next.
So yeah, I am not holding bags, I am watching the most entertaining story I have ever seen, live. Shorts have nowhere to hide, they will fight to the last breath since they have no other options. When they can't do that anymore, then we shall have a squeeze. I will be there for it, and you won't.
Oh, trust me, I know: I was an Jan ape and saw that shit live when Robinhood turned off the sell button due to “volatility”. Still technically one since I have one share from when it was around $400 DRS’d, but I had to sell the rest of my shares at a loss recently to pay for some bills and debt earlier this year. I also remember when DFV was absolutely shat on in the WSB subreddit for his GME options plays and saw GME at a negative beta quite a few times too, so not a complete stranger to it like you seem to think I am.
If the Jan 2021 squeeze was the “gamma squeeze” and not The Squeeze, I genuinely think it would have happened at some point in the past couple of years - and at this point, I’m starting to think that it did squeeze back then and now it’s just all hype from bagholders and cryptobros.
Executives of large companies should always be paid wholly or mostly in stock and not allowed to hedge. This is the only way to be aligned with any 1%er that I can think of, when their interests and those of the common shareholder are unified.
Why should the shareholders interest even be prioritized. What about customers? Or employees? Or the business itself?
This priority on short term profits for stock price is toxic to functional capitalism.
I agree more than I disagree actually, but the nuance I'd add is that I think share price should be much less of a focus than company profitability and dividends, as the whole point of owning stock is in owning the excess profits. Trading firms have made the markets into a casino while low Fed rates have made actual profitability more of a side quest for most publicly traded companies. Look at Rivian, nearly worth a trillion dollars before they even had full production? Ludicrous speculation at the cost of everything is the main course for most traders.
Aside from discussing the urgent need for market reforms to make sure companies trade more closely to their fundamental value, I spend more of my time worrying about customers and workers as well. We have a nation addicted to literal slavery through the 13th amendment, it's a disgrace. Putting more people in prison is literally in the interest of certain for-profit prison company shareholders. It's sick.
OK some priority is reasonable, the company needs to make some money to pay for investments.
But I absolutely agree, why are we rewarding companies that are practically doing con jobs on their customers?
Saint Milton Friedman (bless him) said that the only societal responsibility of a CEO is to increase the wealth of the company's shareholders.
You wouldn't want the CEOs to disobey the sanctified word of Mimil? The shareholders could go broke, and then how would the wealth treacle down? Did you think of this? No, you only think about not starving, you egoistical prole.
Why should a car owners commute be prioritized... what about disabled? Or downtroden? Or the dealership itself?
This priority on personal vehicals for daily use is toxic to functional transport.
What shareholders want isn't what the customers want, what shareholders want isn't what personnel want, what shareholders want isn't what the public wants either.
The shareholders want to fuck the customer, they want to fuck the employees, and they want to fuck the business itself. Fuck the shareholders. They didn't make the business successful, they didn't have the vision that created the value in the first place, they're leeches that ruin the business for short sighted goals.
Fuck the shareholders, and fuck the executives.
No, they should be paid wages like everybody else, and also hired and fired like everybody else. The idea that a CEO is some kind of special superstar with talents nobody else have is ridiculous. The current situation is a scheme to help keep the 1% in the 1%.
I'm happy to talk about what should be the case in a perfect world, but what I was talking about here is what sometimes is the case and less bad than usual.
Threy are paid wages like everybody else. And a CEO of a fortune 500 company will have special skills that nobody else has. The skills can be learnt mostly. But at companies this big, a CEO is an asset, a good CEO that can provide more growth and profit than anyone else will command a salary, and the market forces ensure that the salary they earn is inline with how much value they bring to the company.
And these people still pay tax, and a lot of it. It’s not possible to argue that a CEO is overpaid because CEO pay at this level is defined by the Market.
Don’t they get massive RSUs on top of the obscene salary?
Yes, but RSUs aren't actually stocks, and I don't think of them as a very effective way of unifying the interests of an RSU holder with the shareholder per se.
Restricted Stock Units, also called RSUs, are not stock. When RSUs are granted, no share certificates are issued. The executive actually owns nothing. RSUs are not restricted stock. There are no shares then issued that are subject to forfeiture. Again, no stock is issued, restricted or otherwise. Nor are RSUs options. There is no strike price. No company commitment to sell the executive shares once they vest. So, what are RSUs? RSUs are restricted stock units that represent a company’s promise to issue to you shares of the company’s stock or to pay you the cash value of that company stock, at some date in the future. The company enters a contract with you that if the conditions of the contract are met, you will then get stock or the cash equivalent. Thus, one RSU equals the right to receive one share of the company’s common stock at a later time, or the right to receive the cash value of one share of the company’s common stock at a later time. The number of RSUs you are granted tells you how many shares of stock (or the number of shares of stock used to determine your cash payment) you will receive when they are “settled.”
Source: https://ceoworld.biz/2017/02/28/advantage-rsus-ceo-compensation-package/
This is also, conveniently, a list of the most egregiously overpaid people in the world. Nothing these CEOs do could possibly be worth what they make.
There are people taking in millions each year, not for doing the job of running a company, but for owning companies. There's definitely overlap, but I'm not sure the two are the same list
The comment above wasn't talking about them. He was talking about the CEOs listed here. Time cook makes ~$100m. The company could instead afford to hire ~1000 software developers instead. Is he doing more work than 1000 developers? Certainly not.