• boonhet@sopuli.xyz
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    8 days ago

    I’m just saying, the fact that you’re worried about CEO pay means they’ve fulfilled their purpose. They’re meant to be bait for us.

    Imagine how good an investment it is to pay a guy 95 mill so you (the shareholders as a whole) take essentially zero heat while you get paid several billions.

    There’s about 500 companies in the S&P 500 and on average their CEOs earn 19 million a year. That’s just under 10 billion per year on CEO salaries.

    Total dividends and buybacks from these companies added up to about 1.6 trillion in 2024. This doesn’t include normal (non-buyback related) stock price increases which also improve the theoretical value shareholders receive. Just the money that literally exists as actual money on the company balance sheets and is wasted on making the owners happy instead of improving working conditions, raising salaries, etc.

    And as long as we make a fuss about CEO compensation packages, they will continue to rise. Ignore them and start annoying shareholders and the ridiculous CEO compensation packages start lowering again.

    What really needs to happen is that stock buybacks need to become illegal, or at least highly limited. And there needs to be a way to have a cap on dividends linked to median employee salary. Then there’s not only an actual incentive to increase salaries, but the CEO pay problem will take care of itself naturally. There’s no point in paying them this much if the dividends you receive in return aren’t as high as they used to be.

    Hell, if all you want to do is reduce the inequality, link dividends directly to income inequality within the company. (lowest paid employee salary) / (highest paid employee salary, this being the CEO generally) * (some coefficient) = max % of profits that are allowed to be paid out as dividends. This is actually not as great because now there’s no incentive to raise the lower end salaries, only an incentive to lower the higher end salaries.