The fact that "3 million in cash and 20 million equity" is considered a "conservative cash payment for that scenario" is basically the point: failure on a large scale is rewarded with grotesquely obscene riches while the peons are told to eat cake (or, rather, to stop buying iPhones so they can afford health care).
She took on a gargantuan (and potentially impossible) task, and put in years of her life to taking it on, when she almost certainly had other very highly paid options that were easier.
And lots of people buying iPhones and new cars absolutely shouldn't be. Lack of fiscal responsibility is a very, very large problem in the US at the moment, not some imagining of the GOP or whoever else you're comparing to the old French aristocracy.
I mean that she probably had other offers that were easier but also very very lucrative, so Yahoo had to offer a lot to get her. Unfortunately, no one is probably willing to pay your hypothetical person that much. That is the whole difference. And your person doesn't necessarily work harder, iirc Mayer works a pretty insane schedule. But hard work by itself isn't worth that much, you have to have valuable skills to match, and being a good CEO at the large corporate scale is a pretty rare and extremely valuable skill.
She was hired by people who agreed to pay her that under the conditions they did - those people didn't consider it grotesquely obscene and it was their decision - the only "problem" I see here is that you believe your opinion on her compensation and performance should matter. It's literally none of your business (even if you were an employee, and as a stock holder you could have voiced your opinion by selling, hell you could have even bet against them)
> the only "problem" I see here is that you believe your opinion on her compensation and performance should matter
Given that point of view, none of our opinions here matter, so why did you even bother commenting at all?
I don't think I have some right to change her compensation, but medium/long term I worry about a real breakdown in society when there are such gross displays of outsized rewards for failure.
The people who agreed to pay her obviously did not consider it obscene or they would not have approved it. They probably have similar compensation at their own companies.
On Hacker News anyone can discuss their opinions and beliefs -- without arguing about whether said opinions and beliefs "should matter."
"Literally none of your business" is expressly wrong if he's a shareholder. But even a non-shareholder employee in tech (or any industry) has a right to be concerned when one individual is compensated for being fired, at 200x the annual rate of a typical tech employee who performs well at their job.
It's a public company. It's our business to investigate it and criticize it.
The problem is that CEOs get millions upon millions to fail whereas in an average americans life, a failure of comparable scale (that tanks your personal finances) is met with brutal harshness and almost no safety net. The cultural gap between what is acceptable for the rich and what is for everyone else is widening and causing serious problems in America, both economically and culturally.
Except that most "peons" get their healthcare from their work and pay little to oftentimes no premiums. Yet, being self employed I pay full retail price ($500 a month) because I'm susbsizing others.
It's less that you're subsidizing others and more that a) you aren't yourself being subsidized, and b) you've (in a sense) opted-out of an economy of scale.
Though if you're reasonably young and healthy you are in fact subsidizing others, but not because you're self-employed.
Its absurd for the highest paid employee to be paid more than 10x the lowest.
It's not like a CEO is a hundred times smarter than the people one level below. The reality is that any of the executives could do the same job. At larger companies, what the hell is the difference between managing a division of 500 people or the whole company of 2500? Once you get to numbers that big it doesn't make a difference.
Here's the difference you're wondering about: the person managing the 500 people division does what the person managing the 2500 people company tells them to do.
If the CEO is wrong with their strategy, the company loses a lot more money than the CEO's compensation. If the CEO is right, the company makes much more.
I actually don't have much of a problem if super successful CEOs are paid richly. But where is the risk/reward tradeoff? Why are they still paid so richly when they fail?
Because of the opportunity cost. How does MM's parachute compare to 1) what she could have made as a CEO at other companies with more stable businesses, or 2) by simply staying at Google and enjoying her squeaky clean reputation. What she negotiated with Yahoo is likely a result of the market forces that existed at the time of her hire, and those market forces look different today. If the deal she negotiated was fair, the delta equals her parachute amount.
