> Jassy's executive compensation package, which is tied to Amazon stock price and mostly delivered as stock awards over a multi-year period, was $212 million in 2021.
They used "multi-year" here over the actual timeline: 10 years. It sounds a lot less outrageous that his pay is heavily based on the stock price and comes out to be ~21 million a year as the head of one of the largest tech companies in the world.
Here are the details:
> Virtually all of Jassy’s 2021 comp — $211.9 million — was in restricted stock that vests over the next 10 years, according to Amazon’s proxy statement filed Friday. His base salary was $175,000, unchanged from the two prior years; in addition, Amazon paid $589,149 in security expenses for the CEO.
> The Amazon board’s compensation committee said in the filing that it intends for Jassy’s stock award, which vests through 2031, “to serve as a long-term incentive for Mr. Jassy, and, accordingly, believes it should be viewed as compensation over the 10-year term and not solely as compensation for 2021.”
Doesn't sound like he'll get too many more RSUs yearly.
The award is for 61000 shares, which would have been worth $212M as of the 12/31/2021 share price. It's worth far less now.
Quite frankly, this is as sensible of a comp package for a CEO as one could propose. Compensated in primarily in equity with a long horizon for vesting. If a company wanted its executive to be aligned with the interests of its shareholders, is there really a better structure?
Aligning the incentives of the CEO to the incentives of shareholders by awarding the equivalent of an 0.012% ownership stake seems reasonable to me.
That $212 million was starkly contrasted by the next point in the article, that Warehouse workers typically make $15/hr. It would take about 7,000 years working that wage (full-time) to make the same $212,000,000. It's still a _huge_ gulf, whether the CEO's compensation is in one year or one decade.
Amazon has 950,000 of those warehouse workers. If you completely zeroed out Jassey’s stock $212 million stock award and instead distributed it among those workers, their hourly rate would change from $15 / hour to $15.01 per hour.
You're off by an order of magnitude, but the point still stands. Assuming 2k hours a year, the pay would raise by about $0.11/hr per warehouse employee or about $223 per year per employee.
$223 is significant for a minimum wage worker. Whereas these millions are a bucket in the ocean for the CEO. I see it as nothing less than narcissistic supply for the CEO.
My calculation was wrong because it's spread out over 10 years. So it's really only about $0.50 extra per week. Plus, they are making 2x minimum wage. I'm not claiming that is either adequate or not, but they shouldn't be characterized as all "minimum wage workers." (locality dependent, for sure).
I often hear this and let me just pose this question...
Damn near everyone in America, at least, has access to YouTube or other streaming services. I learned how to program in R from The Teaching Company Plus' (now Wondrium)'s "Learning Statistics: Concepts and Applications in R". 24 lectures. 12 hours of content. Resources available for download. It was the springboard that allowed me to seek out deeper resources and expand my knowledge. Total price, $10.81 for a one month subscription.
You can probably find a lot of equally good free courses at other websites.
My point being this. The information is out there for people willing to seek it out. I came up poor. Really poor. Like, we're having mayonnaise sandwiches tonight for dinner poor. And if you're wondering what's in a mayonnaise sandwich, it's in the name. Mayonnaise. Bread. Period.
Now maybe we need to cultivate a sense of curiosity in our students, so even the ones who end up as warehouse workers at an Amazon can one day aspire to something greater, but at some point, people have to take some responsibility for how their own lives are turning out.
It's really easy to point the finger to society, to the government, to the person next door to you, but at the end of the day, most people have the tools (smartphones, cheap laptops), and they absolutely have the time. But the drive is something that no government program or no private initiative can give them - that you have to pull out of your gut yourself. And if you can't do that, you're doomed to a life of mediocrity.
> Damn near everyone in America, at least, has access to YouTube or other streaming services. I learned how to program in R (...)
Enough with this pseudo-moralistic perpetuation of abuse, specially the tone-deaf ones based on survivorship bias.
Just because someone is not able to win the lottery that does not mean they have no right to earn a living wage that allows them a honest living.
Aren't we supposed to live in a civilized society? Why are you unwittingly normalizing exploitation and the widespread abuse that bars the majority of families from having a decent life? If not for the parents who can't be self-taught engineers, why not for their children? Are those also expected to endure hardship?
Yes. Because we have no idea how to define 'fair'. I hear 'fair wage' over and over but no one can ever explain to me what makes the wage 'fair' other than, "I have a job and I should be able to live on that single job!"
Okay... why? Where is it written that you should be able to live on a single job?
As soon as you can come up with an argument that's not emotive, and is instead quantitative, I'll listen.
Right now, all I hear from people parroting this is that, "It's not right!"
> Yes. Because we have no idea how to define 'fair'.
Well, we do. I mean, we have a pretty solid idea of what represents the absolute bare minimum. For starters, minimum wage should be a living wage. It should be enough all on its own to meet living expenses, including paying for a modest apartment, without breaking any effort rate limit.
Is this too hard?
Are we supposed to pretend that some people simply do not have a right to have a decent life?
> . I hear 'fair wage' over and over but no one can ever explain to me what makes the wage 'fair' other than, "I have a job and I should be able to live on that single job!"
Why exactly do you have a hard time understanding this?
Look at yourself. Look at the living expenses you have, specially the basic necessities. You pay for the roof over your head, for the food on your plate, for the clothes on your back. Do you have a hard time quantifying that?
This is even simpler than that. Landlords and banks already use the concept of effort rate. They already know that if someone's effort rate goes beyond 40% then they are at a significant risk of financial distress. Is it too hard to start from there and determine what's a living wage in any region?
Or is there zero lack of interest, and a desire to pull the ladder out of your own feet to screw everyone less fortunate than you?
> Okay... why? Where is it written that you should be able to live on a single job?
> As soon as you can come up with an argument that's not emotive, and is instead quantitative, I'll listen.
I have a feeling that you will not accept any argument based on general morality as you would describe it as 'emotive'.
I think first that humans should not spend the majority of their lives working and sleeping. In other words: surviving. Especially when there are more than enough resources available to achieve this ( in your country).
Second, exploiting other humans (as above) is absolutely wrong.
So the solution is to chase whatever the market dictates as "well paying", despite being against your interests, maybe drop whatever responsibilities you might have or just, like you say, live in mediocrity, if your socio economic situation forked your chances from the beginning, and your inherent abilities just don't cut it? Do you walk by the less fortunate, and think, they just didn't work hard enough and "kind of" are at fault for their own situation? Because that's a very typical American way of thinking, one that people adapt in America to cope with the poverty around them. I've seen it, from aquinteces who became big, moved to America, and slowly changed their view of people to cope with their suffering and their own fortune, partly due to a really badly made social system. And unfortunately, there are plenty of places like this besides America.
My point is that anyone can learn what they want to do on YouTube.
I served with an Electronics Technician in the Navy who started watching YouTube videos on commercial HVAC and now he does that as a living, servicing mostly restaurants in the Fort Worth-Dallas Metroplex, and not just making a "living", but last year his one-man operation made $300,000.
Not too shabby for just watching YouTube and going to get the necessary certifications.
Do you want to make the best pizza on the planet? There are YouTube videos out there from chefs all over the world, freely giving away their recipes. All you gotta do is pick up the ingredients and get started.
If someone wants it bad enough, they'll go get it, they won't wait for it to be handed to them.
And what if the thing you want to do pays a wage below livable? Or no wage at all.
Not everyone wants to be a software developer or something that makes a lot of money and it's a damn bleak view of the world where the grand diversity of the human race is squashed into a profit-chasing monoculture of workers. Just throw away your dreams and install air conditioning. It's the will of the market.
We've gone from the Renaissance ideals of being well rounded and interesting people to being the best single purpose cog in the machine, devoid of any values except making money. What a depressing attitude when we could just focus on treating people fairly and with respect whatever their choices.
"We" haven't gone anywhere. If you have to work now, you would have had to work just as much in the Renaissance. Those ideals were by and for independently wealthy aristocrats. The working class has always and will always work. If you're willing to have the quality of life that a Renaissance working class man had, 15/hr is plenty.
The working class has never had it better than they have it right now, except for a brief period of a few years in the mid 20th century. You wouldn't know it though, from all the complaining. Sure, society "should" keep improving, but in the meantime there's plenty of ways for someone to improve their situation, and none of those ways involve complaining about rich people.
Do you mean they get to enjoy the fruits of modern life, and hence shouldn’t complain? Again, that’s not a valid argument.
Let’s use some data, for example wealth distribution (1) - the lower classes have stayed lower income, and the middle class is rapidly transferring wealth to the upper classes. How is this sustainable?
It's not an issue of data. Wealth inequality by itself doesn't do anything bad, if the bottom can still afford what they need. It's a matter of having a realistic mindset and sense of self determination. A poor person today in the west has it drastically better than any poor person ever in history; they have a better quality of life as a poor person, and they have mind-bogglingly high levels of income mobility, in a historical sense. No other time in history could someone so easily go from poor to middle class.
So when people spend so much mental energy complaining about how things aren't "fair", okay, sure, but you could instead just improve your situation. There will always be poor people, but an individual will not always be poor. We are not yet anywhere close to a situation where the highest expected value of an individual's time is to complain (instigating revolt).
Look, this is really a pathetic line of argument. If you’re selling self-help books, sure go ahead.
This discussion is about minimum wage, wealth gaps, and relative compensation of CEOs. You do realise that? If you think everything is perfect, feel free to ignore such threads. The status quo exists and doesn’t need your support.
Saying that working class people can just work harder and get higher paying jobs, doesn’t solve anyone’s problem. In fact, it only furthers the problem that only some jobs get a living wage, and even fewer jobs get a good wage.
I have no idea why you think it’s okay to tell poor people to “just improve their situation”, and contribute both their/our tax money towards enriching the wealthy.
Sorry, but no, I will comment my views as I please, whether they support the status quo or not. As this is a public forum, you'd do well to find a way to cope with differing views.
I was poor. I improved my situation. I didn't spend much time complaining about rich people on the internet, because that would have detracted from the time I taught myself marketable skills for 8 hours a day, every day, for 7 months, while delivering pizzas and living in a shithole with 3 other people. You're right though, complaining would have been much easier, but somehow I don't think I'd still be making a quarter mil if I had taken that route.
"Pathetic" to recommend people work hard and fix their life? That sentiment itself is what's pathetic. The world doesn't owe you shit.
I don’t believe the working class is sitting on HN and complaining - it’s mainly people like us who spend exorbitant taxes on a system that doesn’t actually help anyone. It’s not clear to me if you understand this nuance.
The working class is absolutely sitting on Twitter and complaining. It's sad that you view advice to improve yourself as a toxic "fuck you". Is your locus of control so far externalized?
Okay, but if “everyone” goes out and gets a high paying job, who is leftover to do the jobs that keep us all functioning? Should we just mistreat them because they didn’t watch enough YouTube and “upskill” themselves?
I see this theme a lot when this topic comes up, and I feel it misses the point.
Does the CEO provide 700x the value (based on $21.2M / 2000 hrs = $10600 "hourly rate") of a warehouse worker earning $15/hr? They absolutely provide critical input and decisions at the helm of a large ship, but if you break down their input versus the input of everyone under them...is it actually such a huge disparity of mental and physical effort to warrant a 700x difference in pay?
Secondly, if the company wasn't spending that much on CEO compensation, the money could go plenty of places beyond sprinkling pennies at warehouse workers. Infrastructure investment, product development, or other ways to grow the business. Employee wellness programs, crisis/hardship assistance, etc to support the workforce.
Looking at it as only CEO salary divided by employee count is a very limiting perspective that ignores a lot of potential ways that pile of money can be used besides making a very rich person a bit richer.
> I would be willing to bet the CEOs of these ultra-large, ultra-powerful tech firms provide far more than 700x the value of their average worker.
This assertion is amusing given this ultra-powerful tech firm has been systematically wasting resources to ensure their employees are both worked to death and not paid even a living wage.
Eh I'd bet you could train just about any worker to do the role of CEO because it's barely work at all. Source shovelling sand all day is 1000x more difficult than sitting in an air conditioned space hypothesizing about bs and making a bunch of decisions. Have done both. Running a company is in no way as difficult as being on the tools. Come do a days labour for me concreting and tell me your CEO works harder. Come do 13 hour shifts of a drill rig lifting 16 ton of steel by hand and tell me your job as a CEO is harder. Lol you'll die from exhaustion in one job and maybe get slightly disgruntled in the other.
I bet there are far more than 700 people that can do the warehouse worker's job for every 1 that both can and is qualified to do the CEO's job.
The point of that theme is primary to point out that the worker's wages aren't low because of the C-level pay. The worker's wages are low because almost anyone can do their job.
CEOs simply control more powerful tools so their output is multiplied. Someone driving a tractor might produce 400x the output of someone with hand tools, but its not because of the person, its the tool. Swap the two people and there will still be a 400x difference in output. It doesn't mean the tractor driver, or business leader is some sort of outlier genius.
Right. Just like the CEO, a fair amount of people could theoretically drive the tractor, but few have the experience. If you let the wrong person drive the tractor, they might just drive it right in to a river.
Eh your only focused on output from CEO end for estimates and your not doing it well. As mentioned by someone earlier I think the numbers were what 7000 years before a worker on 15 an hour doing 10 hours a day can equate to the 212 million pay packet mentioned? CEO wage is way out of proportion. The CEO doesn't provide 7000 years worth of min wage labor output over his 10 year pay package. Your cooked if you think it's even close.
CEOs can be replaced by algorithms largely. And society will be all the better once they are. Their job literally is just decision making based on input and output of information.
I’ve always wondered how this works- sure these folks are already personally wealthy, and they have large stock portfolios, but the mechanics of tapping into that for liquidity is interesting to me..
Say an exec makes Jassy’s base and has a large equity packages. Do banks feel comfortable writing loans against to-be-vested RSUs? I’d imagine they count RSU vesting as heavily discounted future cash flow.. but not sure.
Plus there is significant volatility in the actual value they bank at the end of the day- sure, speaking on normal terms having an equity package fluctuate at this scale isn’t significant to an individual’s finances, but might be to a bank underwriting, say, a recent Snap exec’s loans…
21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged.
Have you considered that maybe NFL quarterbacks and public company CEOs are both overpaid, but people just like quarterbacks more? After all, I'm pretty sure Aaron Rodgers never laid off nearly 1000 people via a mass Zoom webinar.
> 21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged.
Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! How out of touch with reality are you, if you think that's acceptable for any human to make that kind of money when majority of the world can hardly afford food.
I never understand the arguments against high pay for professional athletes. They are largely union organized labor. Their pays is directly tied to how much money their league is bringing in in revenue (mostly TV deals). If they don't get paid that money then that money goes to the already incredibly wealthy owners of the team. Does that make more sense?
Well it generally stems from the source of the arguments as to why you don't just print money and pay everyone a living wage.
Because money is artificially kept scarce.
Do you think Amazon could maintain its warehouses if it didn't have desperate workers trying to make enough to survive? Shit no it couldn't.
So why do think the boss of that company who well let's be honest could probably be replaced quite easily compared to the warehouse workers (it's easy af to replace a workforce of one man but go try fill 10'000 positions at once) should get paid so much more than the workers literally making his company work? It'd take the AVG worker 3.5 lifetimes on 20 an hour to be compensated the same as one year of that CEO. Are you telling me that is acceptable? Your going to create individuals who have wealth that would take the AVG Joe 35 lifetimes to equal. Lol folks who simp for absurd pays to CEOs are legit bonkers. Your never going to earn that. Your kids and your kids kids are never going to earn that not for another 35 generations. So yeah how fair so you think that is? How equal is that? Creating a class of generational slaves and wealth imbalance that's set to last a few thousand years. Such sustainable business! Lol
> Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!!
Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring.
> How out of touch with reality are you, if you think that's acceptable for any human to make that kind of money when majority of the world can hardly afford food.
Livable conditions for all humans have nothing to do with how to compensate top of the of the top people in their profession. By mixing those 2, you're only hurting your case.
>Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring.
Small nit pick, but it's a function of perceived economic value, which I think is where some of the outrage comes from.
For example, someone may provide a lot of unperceived economic value and not be paid accordingly or they may provide a high level of societal value, but relatively low economic value and not be paid well.
> Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring.
I seriously doubt those skills which are supposed to define scarcity at this point. There is too much management to require a seriously special person on that chair. I'm sure you could have someone from mid-management on that chair and it still wouldn't run worse. It would probably even run better.
So what is the value there? It's almost like with a piece of art. Only because people are ready to pay a price for it, it's valued at that price.
On the other hand you have thousands of slaves working for the same company, generating value you can actually touch and they earn unbelievably less that the artistic head of this monster.
So sure...nice try but you have to be really far away from the bottom to actually believe it.
> I seriously doubt those skills which are supposed to define scarcity at this point. There is too much management to require a seriously special person on that chair. I'm sure you could have someone from mid-management on that chair and it still wouldn't run worse. It would probably even run better.
Did you ever try to manage small org vs big org vs huge company? It's very naive to think that managing dozens of people requires same skills as managing some of the biggest companies in the world.
I worked for small and huge companies though and I could see that it requires far less work to manage a huge one than to manage a small one. I wouldn't even call it "work" if managing the small one is work. It's more like pointing your finger.
You legitimately think you don’t need comparable level of education, work and skill between brain surgeon and leader of big, successful organization?
I assume you never actually lead anyy bigger team for significant amount of time. I’m not a manager, but I’ve lead teams of around 50 people as an IC. It’s tough job that requires very specific skill set to be successful.
Yes I legitimately think that you don't need that at the top of a huge company and I talk from my first hand experience I got from an international F500 company with hundreds of thousand paper pushers and now working in the health sector. The CEO of the former company was a senile wreck. He "managed" the company for quite a few years when I was there. His replacement does almost no work at all. Still on it. I would love to get into detail there but I might doxx myself.
As I wrote above: some mid-management person would probably be much better suited for the position. They are theoretically still in the pool but not realistically so the "scarcity" theory is faked since it's a fake group of people who are being considered. They're most of the times not even considered for their skill set. They've been just sucking up to their predecessor while stabbing everybody else in their way in the back. How this is considered a valuable skill for managing any company (besides in the mafia probably) is beyond me. Maybe you could explain it to me.
On the other hand, you can't replace a brain surgeon with a night nurse. You can't even take a random doctor to do the job and the brain surgeons reputation is directly connected to the actual work he/she does with their own hands. When he gets older, his eyes weaker, his hands shaky, he won't be able to do the job anymore.
Just like the folks here who cheer this madness, those folks who pay them believe in the hype for the same stupid reasons OP outlined above and to justify their own wages.
Those folks are elected by the shareholders though.
So the people who are paying, are (indirectly) paying out of their own pockets.
If someone can't pay out of their own pockets the amount they think someone is worth for them to work for them (or appoint someone to do it for them), then... what's the alternative?
By the biggest shareholders which are in turn the same kind of people.
And they surely not pay it out of THEIR OWN pockets...they pay it out of pockets of their customers and so on goes the responsibility train...
Also what's the "choice" there? Seriously, even calling that "choice" is ridiculous.
The alternative is to force those bloodsuckers to pay wages people can life from. They can keep the rest. Nobody would give a damn because at some point they'd have to rise prices to reflect even in the slightest ways the actual worth of the work of their weakest slaves which carry the whole construct. Maybe and only maybe then they'd cut the wages higher above where all those useless paper pushers sit with their fancy names or they'd lose money because people would stop buying their shit.
Quite easy eh? And everybody knows about that solution. It's just not happening because everybody who could enforce it, is just as greedy as the assholes on top and their "shareholders".
It sounds like you're really angry. Does this directly impact you?
They can pay those wages because workers who can do the work to a level they consider acceptable will accept them.
One way to solve this problem is to convince those workers to work together as a bloc, not accept those wages, and demand higher ones.
Some folks won't like that of course, but the willingness to tell them to fuck off is important. If someone can't say no to a bad deal, after all, they can't actually negotiate.
I don't have a horse in that race however, and have more than enough of my own stuff I need to focus on.
> It sounds like you're really angry. Does this directly impact you?
Sure it does. I'm a human being with a healthy moral compass. Why doesn't it impact you?
> They can pay those wages because workers who can do the work to a level they consider acceptable will accept them.
Wow...do you think people would do it if they had a choice or a saying in this matter? Seriously?
> One way to solve this problem is to convince those workers to work together as a bloc, not accept those wages, and demand higher ones.
But they are not a bloc and the rest of society has done a great job to divide them along artificial lines (race, politics, gender, religion, etc.) and the same basic construct the ones above adhere to: selfishness as the winning factor within the system. The system does also everything it can to hinder unions of any kind. You could see how much of a WONDER it was when some people managed to form one at Amazon. It's been on the news worldwide!
So you making it something they could "just do" is kinda disgusting.
But, it's a good point that you rarely hear much in the public discourse about how much NFL players make, where tech CEOs are a constant target of this sort of anger.
Mind you, I agree with you on the general point, but turns out people don't act terribly rationally about who they get angry at for making too much money.
This is actually a very interesting point. I think what this points out is that society thinks an athlete who is good at throwing a ball earns their money more than a tech executive, and honestly I'm not sure I disagree.
One gets to where they are with extreme practice, talent, dedication, and typically a generous portion of privilege while growing up.
The other (tech execs) often get where they are by lying, cheating, manipulating, and with nepotism.
>Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid.
No, athletes are paid what they deserve. That wasn't always the case, they got it through collective bargaining and it took strikes to make it happen.
The average warehouse worker does not have this option, and the entire government/media/corporate apparatus is designed to make collective bargaining as difficult as possible. The difference between a warehouse worker and an NFL player warming the bench is that one has a union, with teeth, that has fought for his fair share.
> The difference between a warehouse worker and an NFL player warming the bench is that one has a union, with teeth, that has fought for his fair share.
No, the difference is that NFL makes a ton of money per player and they only want the best so the supply is extremely limited whereas basically anyone can work in a warehouse so there supply is basically infinite.
If warehouses paid NFL wages, nobody would spend like 10 years practicing for the minuscule chance they get into the NFL and make NFL wages.
>No, the difference is that NFL makes a ton of money per player and they only want the best so the supply is extremely limited whereas basically anyone can work in a warehouse so there supply is basically infinite.
No, it's not. The NFL athlete market is even more ripe for collusion than other markets because there are only a handful of owners who can (and did) easily collude to keep salaries low. It took several player strikes to get the NFL to the eye popping numbers we see today, and it wasn't always that way. There is no way in hell Tom Brady get's to command a $50MM salary if the next guy on the bench is only making $80k/yr. Owners wont commit to a 500k/yr minimum for a guy who is injured out of the goodness of their hearts. You can't ignore that the jumps in player compensation happened in the NFL after lockouts and strikes. The "invisible hand of the market" isn't a force you can take for granted.
It’s not illegal collusion. To make any of the sports leagues have teams that are even remotely competitive require policies that are not allowed by most other industries. They all have legal exemptions from anti-trust
Sure, even with a union, warehouse workers won't make millions, but a union is not going to demand that either. With collective bargaining, the salary discrepancy will become a lot less disgraceful.
I'm all for unions for the warehouse workers but the CEO also controls AWS which is a high margin high pay industry so I don't think it is fair to compare their low margin low pay retail business wages to the CEO of a conglomerate that has a much more profitable high margin high pay business.
Is there a consensus on the value of leadership? I know there is some research for and against the idea that executive leadership has a meaningful impact on value creation.
Tom Brady did actual work for his team, a CEO does not do $500M worth of work. If there were no employees other than the CEO then the $500M doesn't get made.
The decision to make AWS created 100s of billions of dollars of value. CEO decisions can make and break companies.
> If there were no employees other than the CEO then the $500M doesn't get made.
Right, and if Tom Brady doesn't have receivers to throw to he doesn't win any super bowls. It is the leadership that can create massive amounts of value.
> The decision to make AWS created 100s of billions of dollars of value
I can make decisions to create something all day, none of it makes any money unless effort is put into it's creation. Product and engineering and design made AWS which allowed the company to make billions. The marketing team after that.
And who was leading that effort? When executing, hard decisions get propagated to the top and leaders like Jassy have to make the toughest decisions that result in moving the trajectory of the company/project. This can create or destroy a lot of value.
He isn't being paid for his work (which I assume you are conflating with labor); he is being paid for the perceived value he can bring to the company.
His decision-making can absolutely influence the bottom line far more than any single Amazon warehouse worker could.
Now, I'm not saying that warehouse workers are worthless or should be treated like shit, far from it, but if Amazon doesn't pay him this much, some other corporation will. That's the free market.
Most of the stuff in the "ethics overhaul" is pie in the sky nonsense.
Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations"
What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?
This is most certainly targeted towards AWS being used by ICE. And not just in a generic way of them hosting ICE servers, but with ICE using Amazon Rekognition to identify undocumented immigrants (and allegedly AWS had meetings with ICE to convince them to use the service). The human rights violations come up when you talk about kids being separated from their families and then straight up lost, and the various other immoral things ICE does.
This isn't something Amazon isn't aware of, I went to the AWS Summit in NYC a few years ago and every few minutes the Keynote got interrupted by another protester yelling "Cut ties with ICE" and getting dragged out of the room. I don't think I was the only one quickly googling on their phones to figure out what they were talking about. I couldn't move my previous company off of AWS, but I moved all my personal servers and I steered my new company away from them.
"Undocumented" is mostly just a euphemism for illegal. Amazon does a significant amount of shady things, selling servers to ICE isn't one of them. Open borders are neither feasible nor popular.
I agree. And I would argue that the CIA should also get the boot. Probably about half of AWS's GovCloud should. But all the other heinous stuff that the US government agencies do abroad someone (that's not me) could argue is in the furtherance of national security. ICE is absolutely, clearly, not. There is no justifiable defense of the things ICE does, which is why it's the one most targeted.
Does this strategy of shaming the corporation who wants a nice big government contract instead of, you know, petitioning your federally elected representatives, actually work?
I just double-checked with my peers and it turns out it's possible to protest two different things at once, and that petitioning at multiple sources of the problem is often more effective at getting things done.
>petitioning at multiple sources of the problem is often more effective at getting things done
Could you provide any sources for this? As it stands, I've seen zero tangible results regarding Amazon's ongoing unchecked growth, the prevailing lack of workplace standards in their warehouses or for delivery drivers, monopolistic practices, or any general "ethical" standing of the company.
Same goes for the US Government. Sure, you can vote for who you want and try to elect change, call your congress reps, and protest at the chambers, but it doesn't matter when they nothing gets done at the top level. Until there is an honest discussion had about immigration reform without a partisan spin put on everything, we won't get anywhere with ICE.
If you're looking for an example of companies forgoing profits to have an impact on unethical government policies then consider the death penalty. Many executions have been delayed or called off because companies refuse to sell the state drugs if they intend to kill people with them. Also, medical workers refuse to kill which has successfully foiled executions. The philosophy of "I'll be unethical because if I don't them someone else will" is flawed.
> the prevailing lack of workplace standards in their warehouses or for delivery drivers
Is amazon unique in this because if not, it just feels pointless to complain about it as there is enough competition that if they don't do it, some competitor will and thus the only way you can fix it is through industry wide regulation.
Asking for sources and explanations of completely obvious things is a great way to exhaust people on the internet. Which I assume was the point given the "both sides"iness of the response.
I doubt either works well, but I think corporations like Amazon are likely to be more susceptible to public and investor pressure because their relationship with the public and their investors is voluntary and can be unilaterally ended by those parties, while the government's relationship with the citizens is not voluntary on the part of the citizens. We can stop using and investing in Amazon if they don't listen to us, but we can't do anything against the government except voting for a another politician who will probably do the same thing and is in any case unable to actually change things even if they wanted to.
ICE is unpopular because they the lower the voting power of blue states via removing illegal immigrants and thus lowering their census numbers, so the US media that is almost entirely Democratic[0] isn't a fan. The FBI[1][2] and CIA[3] aren't targeted because they carry water for the democrats. It has nothing to do with human rights, just politics.
This might surprise you, but some of us care about other human beings whether or not they're citizens of the United States. My issues with ICE have nothing to do with census numbers and everything to do with them separating children from their families and literally losing them, then destroying the records of them doing so. Canada is just now digging up the bodies of indigenous children who died at re-education camps, and it'll be decades before we get an actual death toll of ICE's actions.
I'm not speaking for you personally but instead the body politic as it were. I'm putting forward my theory as to why you see plenty of negative stories in the press about ICE but not the CIA. The media manufactures consent to steal a phrase in one case but not the other.
It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job. Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people, and it is almost impossible for the people to countervail the control authority of the extremely small set of owners who own the majority of voting shares.
Let the justice system crack down on people or organizations "violating human rights" and give companies like Amazon orders to cease service if necessary. Or pass laws to require them to filter some extremely specific use cases, such as the dissemination of child pornography.
Mega corporations shouldn't be the ones deciding what is and is not a socially acceptable activity.
I haven't made up my mind yet on the general topic, or rather, how to realize my personal view on this.
I don't want megacorps to take on the role of a government or law enforcement, but I do think there should be societal obligations and expectations towards corporations to use their property and power in a positive way for society. Current law is the overall minimum boundry, not the goal.
My current thought is, that this is mostly a matter of expectations, not actual change from the current state of things. If actors get away from our expectations, they should not be punished as if they broke a law, but it should prompt us to prepare one so it aligns with our expectations.
Maybe it is more a 'please don't force us to legislate every little thing' wishful thinking stance?
>It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job.
IMO it's even worse than that. Not only do we expect corporations to do the government's job, we're also giving corporations more power than we give governments.
Just look at the "it's a private company they can censor whoever they want!" crowd. They actually believe companies who control over half the content we're exposed to online should be able to censor and deplatform whoever they want for whatever reason they want.
I visit Canadian subreddits and they cheer when our telecom oligopoly censors RT news and unironically ask to "do fox news now!"
It's perfectly understandable that a private company has the right under the current laws to do that.
But that doesn't mean we can't have the social conversation over whether that's a reality we want to perpetuate. A tiny number of private companies have de facto control over what information the masses get exposed to, and to a lot of people, myself included, that just seems like an incredibly unhealthy state of affairs in the project towards an ever more vibrant civilization. We have the right to talk about it and decide to try to change the law.
This reply is pretty hilarious when I think about it.
It makes me wonder how much overlap there is between the "private companies can censor who they want" crowd and the "CEO salaries should be capped" crowd.
So… you want the government to interfere with the operation of private companies so they are forced to give a platform to people they don’t want to do business with…
Last I checked, political beliefs are not a protected class.
I want the government to interfere with the operation of _specific_ private companies so they're forced to give a platform to everyone because of the sheer amount of traffic and eyeballs they get every single second of every single day. Facebook, Google, and Twitter come to mind first.
IMO they can't be trusted with having more power than the government. They have way too much control over what people consume on the internet.
Yes because the government would never do something like pass laws to punish a corporation because they spoke out against a policy - see Florida vs Disney.
The last thing I want is to give the government more power.
>Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people
But why the fuck not? They hold an insane amount of power over people, directly and indirectly. The way for the people to have some power back over them is through unions. The fact that our entire system is set up to block collective bargaining is a huge artificial asymmetry.
Unfortunately, our judiciary seems okay to uphold spending money as free speech. With elections increasingly expensive and individual, not corporate, liberties and rights being encroached a bit at a time, what can we do but petition the corporations for a change in laws aka corporate policies.
> Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?
There are plenty of organisations trying to do just that. UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, etc. There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.
> There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.
"Quite easily" is a stretch, that document is a well-intentioned mess. It omits rights that many take for granted, and the interpretation of many of them is highly subjective.
For instance, Article 10 gives everybody the right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal. But it doesn't recognize the right to a trial by a jury of your peers.
Article 12 forbids attacks on somebody's honor or character. Does this mean calling a politician a lying scumbag is a violation of that politicians human rights? And how does this square with Article 19, which states that everybody has a right to freedom of expression?
Article 16 states that men and women have a right to get married, but the phrasing could be interpreted to only protect heterosexual marriages. (Probably provided by Article 2, but that could be debated.)
Article 25 states that mothers and children are entitled to special care and assistance, but says nothing of fathers. This seems to violate Article 2.
Article 26 says that elementary education shall be compulsory, but also states that parents have the right to decide what kind of education their children receive. Does that mean that Germany banning homeschooling is a violation of the rights of parents? Or maybe homeschooling itself a violation of a child's right to compulsory education? Can a parent choose to send their child to the "school of hard-knocks working in a coal mine"? What if instead of a coal mine, it's an illiterate tribal lifestyle with a high child mortality rate? Is a government compelled or forbidden to force native children into schools, as Canada and other countries infamously did in the past?
Article 27 seems to suggest that copyright and patent protections are a human right, but doesn't establish any limitations to this right. Are patents expiring after ~20 years a violation of the human rights of inventors?
Article 29 gives an escape clause allowing a democratic government to limit any of these rights whenever doing so is in the interest of morality, public order, or general welfare of the democratic society. What the hell does any of that mean in practice?
Article 30 can be interpreted to contradict Article 19, forbidding people from criticizing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights if they do so with the intent of destroying any these supposed human rights. Does that mean protesting against copyright is a violation of human rights?
The UNHRC is a wonderful source in that you can more or less use the complement of those they decide to condemn to identify the truly heinous human rights violators and violations.
Has Ki-Moon ever explicitly told any other UN branch to cut it with its rhetoric and unabashed partisan bloc voting?
Do they consider putting someone in prison, for their refusal to surrender their privacy and private property in complying with the Income Tax Act, a violation of Human Rights?
How about confiscating someone's fruit cart because they do not possess a licence for it? This led to Mohamed Bouazizi immolating himself, which triggered the Arab Spring.
How about fining someone for refusing to use someone else's gender pronouns? Or for refusing to perform a Brazilian wax on the male genitalia of a male who asserts they are a woman?
If not, then I question the existence of any underlying principle, beyond ideology, guiding their assessments.
>>There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.
The UDHR, as interpreted by the UNHR High Commission, explicitly defines "collective bargaining rights" as a human right:
Laws that grant collective bargaining rights mandate an employer to engage in collective bargaining with any set of his workers that form a union and demand collective bargaining, to the exclusion of negotiating with any other worker or job applicant. Such a government mandate is a blatant violation of the right to free association, and thus property understood as a violation of human rights. In fact, it violates article 20 of the UDHR, which states:
Like most things in corporate America, you assemble of team and give them the goal of overseeing the due diligence. They won't look too hard so they won't find anything. They're write up how some low friction "solution" that already exists addresses the issue.
Basically, corporate politics as usual - they call the shots, everyone else tows the line, they dress up the results as a win.
Hah, auditors get paid by their clients. There's a real conflict of interest there. Fines are usually a fraction of what the audit fees over years are as well. Good luck finding fraud with that kind of system.
How about we start with rape, torture, and murder, and work our way back.
But like really. How do we figure anything out? We work at it, we learn we make mistakes and we grow. It seems like just throwing you're hands up is oppositional to the entire notions of innovation that guide tech companies in the first place.
It's hard but we pay CEO's $21 million dollars a year to do hard things.
I would tend to agree that corporations are better than any other organization at prolonged, directed, problem solving than government or public university research.
Clickbait title, 'nuke ethics overhaul' really means shareholders turn down activist proposal.
And this thread turned into mostly envious ranting pretty fast. A lot of folks aren't even trying to have actual discussions, just mindless ranting past one another, behaving like crabs in a bucket, etc...
It even makes me doubt if it's all organic or if their are paid trolls from competitors as well in the mix.
Considering that Amazon, and Jeff Bezos, are not known to give out lavish comp. packages willy-nilly, it seems like more could be learned investigating why this guy is worth $21 million a year.
[in small text] ignoring that it's almost all stock, vested over 10 years, and pretending we can predict the price of the stock 10 years from now [in large text] Amazon is paying its CEO a salary of $212 MILLION DOLLARS!!!
What I find telling about all of the critiques of CEO pay, billionaire taxation, etc. is that there is almost no discussion of how to get maximum impact for the monies taxed. People don't want to tax Jeff Bezos because they have really great ideas on how to spend public money to achieve great ends -- if they did, they'd be more interested in how to better spend the entire government budget rather than increasing it by fractions of a percentage point.
I have similar qualms about an athlete who nets $46 million per year [1] for shooting balls into a basket. But, then, who am I to decide his "fair" pay? His club obviously thinks he's worth that…
Limits on compensation are ineffective at achieving their goals under the best of circumstances, and the inevitable "unintended" consequences of further government manipulation in the market place would likely have negative effects.
Crab from the bottom of the bucket here: that's a lot of syllables for ???
Did I say the feds should set the limit? Why can't a respectable board set respectable limits? Cause they don't give a fuck about anything except the stock price EVEN if it means that others suffer in their wake.
That's why. That's the side you're on. Miss me with that libertarian Thiel bullshit.
We set the context in which these forms can operate though. We can decide that forms who pay >10m in comp to individuals are by definition not contributing to social well-being… they must be exploiting some assymetry, rent seeking etc. We don’t have to work out how and why in each case… just that in balance that is almost always the case and so we make that behaviour economically unviable through taxation.
In the US this may be true. It’s certainly not in Europe. 80%+ of tax take is spent on health and social benefits here which are broadly approved of by the population…
I think we, collectively, as humans well define some vague idea as to what's acceptable and what's not, because no matter how smart you are, the realities that humans in motion provide are a couple more orders of magnitude more complex than your SPA repo. And it should be.
Between more ticket sales, higher ticket prices, playoff tickets, more merch sales, and possibly better TV revenue, a player that good can absolutely be worth it.
> should ... truly fair ... should be ... acceptable
How do you determine these absolutes? Why is your 'should' and 'fair' set at whatever value you're using, and not whatever value someone else determined?
The only 'fair' is what someone is willing to pay.
If you aren't willing to pay someone 200m... then don't. Why do you care if someone else is willing and does?
Fair in the sense OP is using it is in the moral sense, not the economic sense. Paying someone tens of millions of dollars when the lowest paid workers in that company make ten bucks an hour may be "fair" in the economic sense, in that it's what the market will bear, but I don't think it is any way fair in a moral sense.
I think too often people let the "morals" of the market replace actual human morals, and assume that because the market is "free" or essentially some uncontrollable algorithm, anything it does is moral by human standards. It's easy to throw your hands up and say "oh, well that's just what the market will bear" and assume all moral responsibility has been accounted for. But I disagree.
If you think it’s fair in an “economic” sense, consider that Amazon employs 1.1 million people. That’s a decent sized city and a very complex economy. Austin Texas for example is about 10% smaller and home of both Elon Musk and a large number of people who could be making more money at amazon’s lowest paying job.
Because firms doing this has negative externalities - to be able to do this they are always going to be exploiting other workers or consumers, or competing in ways which harm society as a whole.
> We need hard limits on executive pay because if you adjust every other employees salary at a truly fair rate, Jassy should be lucky to make 10 million a year.
This makes no sense. Why should executive salary be tied or compared to the salary of any other employee role? Should my salary as a dev be a function of what a janitor makes? Should my Manager's salary be tied to my salary? I'm not sure where this idea originally came from but compensation should be based on the value the employee is adding , the rarity of that employee's skills, and how in demand that skill set it, not some arbitrary multiplier of another role's salary. I don't care if a CEO is paid NX the rate of the lowest paid role as long as they are adding value commensurate with their salary. Also, "truly fair rate" according to who, you? What makes you qualified to be the arbiter of corporate compensation?
> There is literally no job on earth that should command this price tag.
The people who have a vested interest in deciding this, namely Amazon shareholders, apparently disagree with you.
>Should my salary as a dev be a function of what a janitor makes?
Should definitely not be more than FIVE times what he makes. Because you're not 5x smarter, efficient, or important as FIVE (5) janitors. Period.
And if you think you are and you're using the "free market" as a factor, well then I'm sure you think BTC should of ever been worth 60k or that Tesla should be worth $900 a share.
It's incredible that people plant their morality within the confines of a "definitely rational market that's definitely not experiencing a bubble".
You're entitled to your opinion, and by all means share it—but in my earnest (peasant, non-leet) opinion, I think I can draw a straighter, truer, more direct corollary from a persons idea of what fair is (no matter how opaque) than I can from whatever bullshit he types in as a reply.
> Should definitely not be more than FIVE times what he makes. Because you're not 5x smarter, efficient, or important as FIVE (5) janitors. Period.
Again, it doesn't matter if I'm smarter, more efficient, or "more important" than 5 janitors; what matters is how much money I can help the company make and how hard I am to replace. If I'm enabling the company to make 10X more money than the efforts of a janitor could yield and I'm very hard to replace, then I see no reason why I shouldn't be paid more than 5 janitors combined (granted, this isn't a great comparison because a janitor is more of a cost center, but you get the point). It has nothing to do with who the janitors are as people or who I am as a person, it's purely about money. Also where did you get the number 5 from? Why not 6 or 4? This is what I mean when I say this is very arbitrary.
> but in my earnest (peasant, non-leet) opinion, I think I can draw a straighter, truer, more direct corollary from a persons idea of what fair is (no matter how opaque) than I can from whatever bullshit he types in as a reply.
You seem to believe that companies exist to provide good paying, "fair" jobs, when infact they exist solely to make money. People are paid based on their ability to contribute to this, full stop.
Hahaha, of course you don't see that. You're talents are rarified and frozen in amber (you work in an opaque, cut throat, morally bankrupt industry that headhunts just for the sake of taking talent off the market).
I 100% agree that's it's arbitrary, and my figure wasn't a source of categorical, universal truth, but guess what? The hardest questions in life resides squarely in a GREY area.
I'd even argue that your intense rationality and reliance on systems (no matter how ineffective, or even untrue) is a crutch because, in theory, you will always be at odds with the proletariat.
There are people, namely Amazon shareholders who are happy to pay that money.
It's a voluntary transaction, there's nothing unfair about it.
People who are not in tech are also shocked to hear about developers salaries. And yet, there's nothing wrong with it, it just means shareholders can (on average and with a certain degree of risk) extract more than that value out of CEOs or engineers. If this wasn't true those companies won't be profitable (if we exclude market distorting forces like government bailouts or regulations that help top companies to maintain their edge).
There's an argument to be made that companies could afford to pay less for these roles and have the same performance - that may very well be true. But this doesn't make it unfair; simply put, the customers (the shareholders) are pooling their money and deciding to shoot for the best of the best by offering the best compensation.
> We need hard limits on executive pay because if you adjust every other employees salary at a truly fair rate, Jassy should be lucky to make 10 million a year.
Fair, by definition, is when the market reaches equilibrium. The shareholders think this is a fair salary. Why is your opinion more valid than theirs? Sure, the salary is high, but it seems commensurate with the value that Amazon generates. Literally 30% of the entire internet runs on AWS, and that's just one part of their business.
Given that Tim Cook earns ~100M yearly, and Satya Nadella is at ~50M yearly, it seems low in comparison.
> Fair, by definition, is when the market reaches equilibrium.
This is absurd. "The market" is amoral: it's just a collection of human behaviors that are shaped by laws, culture, and customs. All of those can change, the law can change quite easily.
It does not; you might be thinking of "justice." Even animals have a primal sense of fairness without the moral baggage (e.g. every dog gets one treat, etc.).
I take you point in part (justice is the stronger version) but fairness as you describe only occurs in social animals which actually do have a more complex definition of fairness than simple equality. Chimp ‘morals’ would include the notion that high status individuals “deserve more” - which I think is simple moralising which goes beyond equality
I think we have a disagreement here. Justice and fairness, in my view, are two distinct categories. Fairness is not always just (e.g. separate but equal), and justice isn't always fair (e.g. affirmative action). There's occasional overlap, but the overlap is incidental, not contingent.
I think you don't understand the difference between equality and equity.
I don't believe everyone should get the same slice. I just believe that 200 million is a far cry from your salary. If that was untrue you wouldn't be talking shit on a message board.
I feel like you’re using the word “fair” in an econ 101 sense, not in the way most people use it.
“The market reached equilibrium” with child labor and indentured servitude. Most people consider child labor unfair, so law/culture/customs changed how the market operates.
Even within the narrow definition of “fairness” in economics you still have externalities. This can become really tricky and require ethical considerations beyond a “pure math” problem.
No, they consider child labor, slavery, indentured servitude, etc. unjust. You could easily come up with a thought experiment where every child (prince or pauper) has to partake in forced labor. This would be fair, but it would still be unjust.
The often-cited notion that a warehouse worker has even remotely the same responsibility as a company CEO is just straight-up fiction. Ergo, their jobs are incomparable.
I'm not so sure. Stakes may be higher but feels like CEO performance doesn't correlate strongly to education, past experience, class, or anything really. So perhaps a random lottery--with some IQ floor--and lower pay would be a win-win for companies and workers.
My guess is corporations will fight any sane limits to their power and accumulation of wealth. And those at the top of corporations even more so. Which is why we have a government to balance the needs of the many against the consolidated power of the few who would exploit them
I agree, and I think the argument "well most of it is stock" is also bullshit. Comp is comp; warehouse workers could be granted RSUs, but they don't (afaik) because reasons. Every dollar he's compensated could be compensation elsewhere. Every share; to someone else.
A classic counter-argument is "well who gets to determine what is fair". I'd counter that with: who determines how much value he, inextricably and uniquely, has added to the company? It's all a farce. No one actually knows (but, oftentimes, the people at the top have bunk reports to justify their position, a privilege line workers don't have).
We need a law which at least begins to lay the foundations for something like: the total all-sources hourly-adjusted compensation for the highest compensated person (employee, contractor, anyone) in any company cannot be more than 1000x the lowest. Regardless of the specifics, the thing I love about that wording is: Amazon absolutely could not afford to pay all of their people $212,000+. But by them saying that, they're in-no-uncertain-terms saying that they're totally unwilling to lower Jassy's comp; drop it to $65M, and now lets try again, can you really not afford to pay everyone at-least $65k? Big Boy Jassy wants a raise, you gotta find the money for everyone; and if you can't, is he really doing that good of a job?
"The talented execs will leave" and go where? Europe? China? Good! The US has massive talent at every traunch of a typical company. Get out! There's dozens of people inside your own company who could do a better job in your seat than you, for a tenth the price, and the only reason they're not sitting there is the gatekeeping every board and exec team participates in to defend their throne.
So Jeff Bezos creating a company that employs people and grows the economy in a non zero sum way through efficiency gains shouldn’t be rewarded billions for the trouble? Why are people so concerned with the salary of the ultra rich? It doesn’t make your life objectively worse, if anything our lives are substantially better because of it, even if you don’t directly shop at Amazon.
Because they can privately buy the regulators who can then make them even richer. If you place that much influence in the hands of anyone, it will be misused for personal gain.
1. If the regulators can behave so unscrupulously, making Jeff Bezos poorer won't solve that problem.
2. Wealth and influence are always used for personal gain. That's kind of the point, no? People are incentivized to work and earn money exactly so they can use it to make their lives better.
> Why are people so concerned with the salary of the ultra rich?
Two reasons. First it's because the left lets Twitter determine their messaging and so the economic problems facing the country have been framed incorrectly with an unnecessary moral slant. The economic problems facing the poor are not a function of "wealth inequality" (the delta between rich and poor), but instead are a function of the poor having insufficient resources and services regardless of how much money the rich have. When you frame the issue as wealth inequality, then bringing Bezos's wealth down without any concomitant increase in funding for the poor is a victory as the delta is being reduced. Certainly the rich will need to be taxed more to pay for additional services necessary to improve the lives of the poor and middle class, but explicitly lowering the wealth of the rich doesn't need to be in scope to solve the problems we are facing.
Second, no one wants to admit it and by saying it this comment will get flagged, but people care because they are jealous and misinformed. They have zero understanding of what an executive's job actually entails / they don't know anyone in such a role, and as such they (incorrectly) think anyone could do it. Therefore they don't understand why executives are receiving very high levels of comp or amassing massive net worths when they don't appear to be "doing" anything complex.
> they are jealous and misinformed. They have zero understanding of what an executive's job actually entails / they don't know anyone in such a role, and as such they (incorrectly) think anyone could do it. Therefore they don't understand why executives are receiving very high levels of comp or amassing massive net worths when they don't appear to be "doing" anything.
Yep. It's the same jealously when people are paid millions to just shoot a ball in a hoop. Like, no. You shoot a ball into a hoop and have people who will pay $1000 to watch you do it.
The hn bootlickers really come out hard when someone suggests that wealth inequality can't be fixed by unregulated capitalism. Won't someone think of the oligarchs?
its not a "job" it is leadership.. an appropriate analogy is closer to Roman General than school bus driver
within their own circles, competition is fierce.. part of the stature of a modern leader is in the dollar value, much less of the ornamentation and ceremonial weaponry of old.. bankers like it better now
Who determines what fair is? What makes you more well equipped to set the rules here than the market? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious.
This is a stock grant that vests over 10 years, so averaged out it's 21 million a years. Saying that his salary is 212 million is straight misinformation
You’re quite active and emotional in this thread, but you failed to do basic math, or just didn’t read the article. It’s not 200/y, it’s 210 in 10 years. That tells something you need to know as well, those little details.
If everyone clicked "sell amazon" in their brokerage account right now, Amazon would still have millions of people log on to their site and buy stuff tomorrow.
The purpose of a company isn't to employ people. It's to take raw inputs, including employee labor, and turn that into outputs that people want. Employee relief comes in the form of voting with their feet or if they're critical inputs into what the black box produces
Amusing. The purpose of a company was originally exactly that: to employ people and provide services and value to the community they existed in. I mean, this is still the exact reason politicians cite when providing incentives to companies - bringing jobs to their cities/states.
I'm pretty sure I don't like this new definition; it feels like it's based on greed, not value.
> purpose of a company was originally exactly that: to employ people and provide services and value to the community they existed in
This describes charities, trusts and local governments. Maybe artisans. The East India companies weren’t trying to “provide services and value” to anyone but their owners. Even going back to Roman times, civic duty and commercial interests were distinct parts of peoples’ work. You were expected to do both. But the unification of the two pursuits appears to be more modern.
Shareholders are not the only stakeholders who should be considered in a company.
"The purpose of a corporation is to ... create value over the long-term, which requires consideration of the stakeholders ... (shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, creditors and communities) ..."
That's not historically accurate. Historically, the purpose of a company was to be a vehicle that a passive partner could invest capital into an enterprise providing a return on investment, such that an active partner (who did not) could manage it [1].
I do not see historical support for your claim that the purpose of a company was "to employ people and provide services and value to the community they existed in" even if that would be an ideal social outcome (and one which I'd personally prefer to see everywhere).
The purpose of a corporation is to conduct a lawful, ethical, profitable and sustainable business in order to create value over the long-term, which requires consideration of the stakeholders that are critical to its success (shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, creditors and communities) ...
Business corporations are perhaps the most influential organizations in society and have long been recognized as important contributors to the common good. Society grants corporations unique privileges in order to harness their great capacities to serve its needs.
It's not clear how those 4 quotes are supposed to relate to each other without added interpretation. Is there something more you'd like say?
For what it's worth, I don't know if any of those sources cover broad economic trends across history. I do find them in pursuit of noble goals for the early 2020s.
But in this case, my opinion is that there's a bit of a gulf there in between "this is how I would like things to work" and "this is how things have worked today/in the past/for a long time".
The reason companies are given legal standing and privilege is because they serve a useful social function, in addition to being a legal nicety for investment. If companies don’t serve useful social purposes we can change the law to withdraw those privileges.
That's incorrect. They are given legal standing and privilege because they serve a useful /economic/ function (tax base).
The social function is downstream from this, and it's also what creates friction to actually /change the law/ to withdraw those privileges -- you do it at the risk of hemorrhaging that tax base which funds the governing apparatus.
I think you have a narrower definition of ‘social’ function. I mean the things that are useful to society as a whole. Things we seem not helpful/useful/conducive to people leading best lives can be curtailed. Not everyone shares the view that “economic freedoms” are inalienable when they entail externalities.
Hence why every business owner boasts about being a job creator. This despite these jobs being an unwanted side effect of the actual goals of the business. Cost centres.
'Look at all these employees I resent having to spend money on and actively try to make redundant and underpay. Aren't I just great?'
Says who? I think the idea of "purpose" of a company is very nebulous and interacts opaquely with: the "incentives" of a company, the societal purpose for having companies, the mission statement of a particular company, etc. I would say the purpose of a company is mostly to make money for the owners of the company, which is not the exact same as what you said.
Practically, we haven't yet developed anti-fragile socio-ideological technologies which can out compete shareholder-maximization ideologies(SMIs). Instead SMIs are adept at castrating anti-SMIs and rendering them inert before they can establish a foothold. The world we enter into today is the product of this anti-SMI castration. You can even see echos of the great SMI war play out whenever SMI granades are casually lobbed in the bushwar of this discussion.
Not in the US, but Germany and Scandinavian countries show this very much is a possibility. Medium sized firms in Germany just don’t behave the same way they do in the US and large enterprises are subject to far more state intervention. And it still works fine.
Yes. My comment was very US-centric. You're right; the outcomes are demonstrably true. Board-level representation is a good example of this. Maybe asking rhetorically in a different way - what is the series of chess moves where that goal is achieved?
This is why whenever a company claims to be "creating jobs" they're talking about a byproduct they're often trying to reduce/stop not a goal of their business. IMHO "job creation" rhetoric can be dismissed out of hand when discussing taxation and regulation.
It's to take raw inputs and turn it into money. No one really wants telemarketing calls, or patent lawsuits but companies "produce" those things regardless to make money.
Stock value depends on growth rate and overall profitability much more than on simply "keeping costs down".
Shareholders invest in Amazon for growth and (now) for profit. Compensating the CEO based on how effectively they deliver that seems like a pretty dang obvious strategy for shareholders to support.
?? There's a handful of people in the world with the level of insight into amazon's internals as Jassy has.
And compared to most in the article, Jassy's comp is very shareholder friendly. He's paid 99% in RSUs - his income already dropped about a third from when the comp was agreed.
You mean how much better would I perform for an extra million dollars? How much better could I perform with a team of assistants each making six figures?
Why on earth should one accept a percent-based framing of these ludicrous numbers?
They used "multi-year" here over the actual timeline: 10 years. It sounds a lot less outrageous that his pay is heavily based on the stock price and comes out to be ~21 million a year as the head of one of the largest tech companies in the world.
Here are the details:
> Virtually all of Jassy’s 2021 comp — $211.9 million — was in restricted stock that vests over the next 10 years, according to Amazon’s proxy statement filed Friday. His base salary was $175,000, unchanged from the two prior years; in addition, Amazon paid $589,149 in security expenses for the CEO.
From Variety https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/amazon-andy-jassy-2021...
Edit:
> The Amazon board’s compensation committee said in the filing that it intends for Jassy’s stock award, which vests through 2031, “to serve as a long-term incentive for Mr. Jassy, and, accordingly, believes it should be viewed as compensation over the 10-year term and not solely as compensation for 2021.”
Doesn't sound like he'll get too many more RSUs yearly.