It’s shares and Apple’s market cap is 2.44 Trillion. Effectively shareholders paid 0.03cents on the dollar for Tim Cook. In exchange they get a steady ship that slowly and surely increases in value.

Why quibble about such a small amount? You’ve paid 0.03% of your current Apple holdings for a decade of growth creating value many orders of magnitude greater.

> Why quibble about such a small amount?

I am not quibbling about THAT amount.

I am quibbling about the fact that he (like other tycoons) sits on top of a giant pyramid of human labor, the majority of which earns just enough to make ends meet in a low cost of living country.

Sure, Tim Cook is a good person and deserves reward for what he has done and it should be "a hellava lot". At some point, however, that reward starts becoming absurd and nonsensical.

Market cap is not a real sum of money that actually exists and coupd be retrieved. You, the sharegolder, oan the company, and pay Tim Cook out of revenue. From that perspective salaries of upper management are not so trivial

It can’t be retrieved in one go. But provided every shareholder doesn’t try to liquidate their position simultaneously, then it’s a reasonable metric to use for determining how much shareholder value was lost when Tim was granted the shares.

Disregarding market cap as not real money would be like disregarding your checking account as not real because the bank operates a fractional reserve.

Apple's 2020 revenue was 274 bn $, and on track to substantially increase in 2021. Tim Cook's compensation is about < 0.3% of that revenue.

Then again, I'm not sure it makes more sense to compare stock-based compensation with revenue than with market cap.

> Is there something substantive behind that 750 million figure other than very powerful people just paying themselves as much as they can get away with? I think not.

If you are already rich enough to retire many times over, why should you keep working on something that doesn't move the scale of your money (and consequently power and ability to do other things, including starting a new business that could disrupt your previous business?)

Think of it this way: a lot of the money that is being paid to Tim Cook is to ensure that he doesn't go to work somewhere else.

Because you like your current job? Why would someone like Cook start a new business when he can do it within Apple?

Can he turn Apple into a computer company that would focus on replaceable, modular electronics? Something like Fairphone, but on a bigger scale and with more resources, or that could have more runway without turning a profit? No, he can't. Apple is known for being a company that wants to integrate everything and needs to control all of its process. And for all the environmental talk, they would never sacrifice their bottom line to ensure their products are really green.

Could he turn Apple into an online education platform that leverage open source platforms and open hardware to make it as affordable as possible to everyone? No, he can't. Apple depends on the brand of exclusivity and premium products.

Need I go on?

When did Tim Cook become interested in those things? No he can’t turn Apple into a pizza delivery service either. And?

Apple is a hardware company that makes phones, pushes for a "green and socio-environmentally fair" agenda and also markets its computers to young people and the education market. Is it really that much of a stretch that this someone at Apple would be interested in working on these areas?

In any case, it's a sad state of the world when even the CEO of the richest corporation in the world can not be allowed to be interested in anything else that is perfectly aligned with the company's goals.

Wouldn't he have done that by investing some of his money by now? It's clear he's not interested in those things and his interests align with Apple's

More likely, he can not invest in these kind of things without being called out for conflict of interest.

But anyway, you asked if there is any kind of job that he couldn't do at Apple. I just gave you a couple of examples. You didn't specify that it had to me something that he would be personally interested in doing publicly. I don't know him personally nor I care about him (or Apple) to spend more time and thought about the matter.

If he did, would he then be worth the 750 million?

If he did, it would be because the board would have approved the decision and would be willing to make this kind of bet.

But this is getting so much in the realm of the hypotheticals, I really don't care about the argument either way.

It's a very interesting topic, but clearly the investors/board got what they wanted so they are giving him the payout. It was tied to a goal and they got that goal. So presumably the people paying are happy to pay him that amount.

Would he have reached/pushed for a particularly aggressive goal for less? Could someone else have achieved that goal for less?

No doubt there is some element of personal relationships between everyone in the compensation committee and the ceo.

> If yes, then it's pure greed. If no, then it's too much.

I think these numbers are set by compensation committees of the Board of Directors using consultants that analyze other private and public company data. So if you have some small number of greedy individuals pushing for massive compensation based on stock performance, then that trickles through the industry. Cook doesn’t have to be greedy to just not want to be underpaid relative to market, even when the market is set by a few greedy individuals.

It is a race to the top. Solvable via regulation if anyone really cared, but I suspect no one really does.

> It is a race to the top. Solvable via regulation if anyone really cared, but I suspect no one really does.

Well put. I suppose no one cares enough because, after all, there aren't THAT MANY billionaire tycoons. And, sure, they perform a valuable function in putting many people to work and giving away millions of turkeys on thanksgiving, etc.

But now, we're in an era of billionaires racing each other into space and compensation levels which are "astronomical". It's in some ways a repeat of the age of robber-barons except I don't see it slowing down any time soon. Now I wonder what ended "the gilded age" ~100 years ago? Oh yeah, world war + economic crash.