He's perfectly capable of giving stock to these employees as well.

It's simple to say we'd be more charitable if we had incomes 1,000x or more our current annual compensation, but I do genuinely wonder if I'd be different. Would I be greedy, would I care about doing right to the laid off employees-- it's hard to imagine how crossing that bridge might change people.

I'm not going to try to justify how I would act, or how anyone else should act, were I to have a compensation package putting me easily in the top 0.1% of society, but we can collectively dispense with the notion that certain types of compensation (i.e. stocks) must necessarily be prohibitively harder for a CEO to give up than just money.

The CEO of Robinhood would need to file a public form with the SEC if he wanted to sell any of his shares. People watch that and say "hmmm, why is the CEO of Robinhood wanting to sell shares? I wonder what he knows that we don't" and the stock goes down on that information.

Stock is absolutely more difficult to liquidate for a CEO.

I think by example we can guess that you might act exactly that way (since so many other people do) but IMO the important thing is how do we as a society want people to act (ITT it would not be how this person is acting).

IMO we as a society should pass rules and laws to prevent people from acting this way ie limits on compensation.

Is it charitable to accept responsibility for the consequences of your mistakes, and compensate those you've harmed? Or is it just common decency?

It's probably not that simple. Most chief executives delegate the responsibility of hiring staff to others. Sure, the buck stops with the executive, but ultimately nobody can review every single operational decision at scale. Maybe they hired for a world where the pandemic didn't happen and the monetary supply didn't tighten, then the world changed.

The entire purpose of the C-suite is to stay on top of macro level stuff, and its the boards purpose to make sure the C-suite is doing it. They didn't do their job. And they got rich not doing it.

I think it's high time to see if there aren't better ways to track the macro level stuff than hiring overlords. It seems to keep not working well.

What CEO doesn't approve overall hiring numbers? If you're worth paying millions upon millions of dollars a year, shouldn't you have capital-F Foresight?

Or is it more that most public-company CEOs are probably not playing above replacement level?

If the CEO is ultimately responsible for nothing, why are they paid so exorbitantly?

"With great power comes great responsibility"

Nah, there's not really responsibility when your parachute is golden.

Well I agree that there isn’t in practice, but I wish that there was

Looking at Robinhood stock, it might be way less than that now. But I get your point

Robinhood is a public company. There's no difference between getting stock/RSU compared to getting paid in cash and then using it to buy stocks.

There is if you are an executive that is privy to non-public information.

That's insider trading, and a whole different accusation than the one levied above, which is implying some sort of wealth inequality issue that executives are compensated in stocks and non-executives are compensated in cash.

My point is that if you have non-public information, you can’t actually sell the shares for cash whenever you wish, so it’s not the same thing.

>you can’t actually sell the shares for cash whenever you wish, so it’s not the same thing.

I guess it's true that you can't sell "whenever you wish", but if you set up a rule 10b5-1 plan your shares are effectively as good as cash.

Frustrating to see the incredibly common conflation of equity and salary. Even though it’s always correctly suffixed with “compensation”, people assume that means “a bank account with 8 zeros”.

That's because it effectively is. I suggest you look into pledged asset lines (and more broadly 'buy, borrow, die'), which are even more tax advantaged than just getting paid directly. Sure, there is some marginal cost associated with borrowing against granted equity, but it's almost certainly less than 10%. So yes, it is accurate to assume that if an exec vets $x00 million dollars of equity a year, they have a high percentage of that available to spend on whatever consumption or investment they desire.

Quite possibly the best comment in this thread. Some people are quick to say that the high on-paper number doesn't mean anything, but remain (in most cases wilfully) blind to the fact that the low on-paper number doesn't mean anything either. As you point out, the real number is unknown and often not fixed but for all practical purposes probably still way higher than most of us will ever experience.

It's even more bizarre/frustrating for someone, especially in tech where many of our TC is largely RSUs, not understand that wealth is almost never held in cash.

When I was young (and poor) I also believed that being rich meant having Scrooge McDuck piles of cash to swim in.

After my first big RSU payout I quickly realized that nobody with more than a few 100k in assets keeps anything close to the majority of them in cash. Savings accounts are for the poor. Anyone, even in the every day millionaire level, keeps most of their wealth in non-cash investments, leaving only enough cash to cover crisis situations. Especially with inflation this high, holding cash is literally throwing money away.

Nobody has a bank account with 8 zeros, except maybe lottery winners that never learned the basics of asset management.

It does happen, though it’s a newsworthy event: https://nypost.com/2011/06/30/atm-receipt-showing-astounding...

> But it’s not clear where the customer spent his 400 bucks.

Haha, I have an idea. P.S. Dealbreaker.com is great in general for tabloidy high finance news

Scrooge McDuck was a gold bug so he may have kept the gold to swim in just like Peter Schiff

Canonically according to Rosa the money bin is just his “personal memento” cash - the money he earned by hand and remembers every bit of. It’s only a portion of his fortune.

That's a great point, even Scrooge McDuck does not hold cash!

not putting everything in a "saving account" isn't the same as having it tied up in equity. OP was contrasting cash and equity.

Feels like you're arguing semantics, either way the CEO is being made wealthy right?

Probably still getting much more than they need to live off of, so some of that should go to the people getting let go.

Steve Jobs famously took a $1 salary and everything else was in stock.

Coz salary is taxed higher, many billionaires do this. He had enough control to not pay tax and just spend on the company's credit card.

The take away here is, he did get compensated. What proportions were cash salary, irrelevant.

That's not really true, at least not in the same way being discussed above. Jobs already owned millions of shares in Apple stock, so yes, he profited from the stock but AFAIK that was only from the appreciation of existing stock, not from new grants.

If nothing else, he also got unlimited personal use of the company jet.

There's a whole options backdating scandal associated with his comp, so no, it wasn't just existing stock.