A Historical Look at CEO Pay
By Barry Ritholtz - October 22nd, 2011, 10:30AM
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Please use the comments to demonstrate your own ignorance, unfamiliarity with empirical data, ability to repeat discredited memes, and lack of respect for scientific knowledge. Also, be sure to create straw men and argue against things I have neither said nor even implied. Any irrelevancies you can mention will also be appreciated. Lastly, kindly forgo all civility in your discourse . . . you are, after all, anonymous.
October 22nd, 2011 at 9:05 am
401k plans, efts and leverage…
October 22nd, 2011 at 9:06 am
And of course, outsourcing.
October 22nd, 2011 at 9:15 am
hey, wait you guys – don’t forget frozen pay, part-time work only, and forced over-time without pay for the “little people”, you know, ACTUALLY DOING THE WORK of their fucking hell-hole, slave-labor, 3rd world managed companies. Why not nationalize them and the banks too?
When’s huntin’ season start?
October 22nd, 2011 at 9:39 am
All of the above end up at the feet of the incestial world of BOD, their compensation committee, and the small but important role of compensation consultants. Once all (or most) the benchmarks go up benchmarking makes all the sense in the world. Who in the room wants to be responsible, on the basis of protecting owners (i.e., stockholders), for pushing down the pay of the CEO that asked them to serve on the Board?
October 22nd, 2011 at 10:53 am
That’s capitalism, baby!
October 22nd, 2011 at 11:09 am
Mozilo earned every penny of that. His contribution to the welfare of this country was remarkable.
October 22nd, 2011 at 11:29 am
Louis, I get it: Mozilo Put people on welfare.
Yes, there’s no link between performance and pay there, except for Apple.
October 22nd, 2011 at 11:43 am
Let’s just take Jobs at 749M. Does ANYONE deserve that kind of money? What board, in it’s right mind unless it’s filled with sycophants would allow that to flow to one person instead of to employees and shareholders? Does anyone really ever NEED this sort of compensation? Is it really necessary to pay anyone more than, say 10x what the average worker makes to run a place and plow the rest back into the company as a whole and the shareholders?
And if anyone gives me the “the person will go elsewhere” line my attitude (as it is with my employees) is “go right ahead, no one is irreplaceable and if they are, it’s the fault of the organization”. If Apple can never replace Jobs, then he did a piss-poor job of building a company. Because, you know, that’s what a CEO is supposed to do. Not be famous.
October 22nd, 2011 at 12:01 pm
Let’s see 10X Increase in CEO Pay + 10X increase in college tuition= poor stock market performance+ lower college test scores and an un equipped workforce.
You would think will all this investment we could grow jobs and prosperity. Oh wait all investment is not the same you are supposed to get a return on investments, bummer we forgot that part! Let’s increase taxes and try that for a while..
October 22nd, 2011 at 12:23 pm
MY 80 yr old grandmother owns a microwave and an air conditioner, according to the Heritage Foundation – that means She’s well off, so we should cut her retirement and use that money to give CEO’s “job creating” tax breaks.
October 22nd, 2011 at 12:48 pm
Can’t believe Yahoo! makes the top 10.
October 22nd, 2011 at 3:21 pm
A brief post on the issue:
Compensation and the Social Network
http://culturalengineer.blogspot.com/2009/10/compensation-social-network.html
October 22nd, 2011 at 4:11 pm
@econimonium:
Steven Jobs still has a salary of $1.00 which has not changed since 1997 when he rejoined the company, no bonuses, some contractual compensation for the use of his private jet. His “compensation package” comes from increased stock prices.
A bargain.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/01/07/apple-ceo-steve-jobs-2010_n_805762.html
October 22nd, 2011 at 9:57 pm
No relation whatsoever to performances that I can see, except for Steve Jobs and, to some degree, for Larry Ellison.
Ellison is a bit of a peculiar case given that he’s not just the CEO but also the largest Oracle shareholder. He owns something like 1.1 billion shares out of a float of 3.9 billion shares and change, 28% of the company. That being said, the remaining 72% can be rightfully p***ed off by Ellison’s compensation for FY2009, $57 millions for Goatee Larry and precious zilch for the stock and the shareholders.
October 22nd, 2011 at 10:04 pm
I would call most of them crime perpetrators against Capitalism. Sweet, illegal but legally binding deals via airtight contracts drawn up by corrupted BOD that would make a tax collector in Myanmar look straight as an arrow. No need to steal the old fashioned way a la Dillinger, why risk your skin? The Enron lot and Madoff-ites were aberrations, really just poor execution, so, they got themselves snagged in our legal system’s net that has holes in it large enough to pass a whale through. They should have consulted with Bob Nardelli, Dick Grasso and of course Bob Rubin, Eisner and many, many others who “executed” so flawlessly.
October 23rd, 2011 at 2:50 pm
[...] average CEO gets paid 500 times what the average worker receives. That’s up from just 26X in the 1960s. Occupy Wall [...]
October 23rd, 2011 at 8:33 pm
Damn you and your class warfare graphs! lol