Those high ratios led Apple shareholders to request a pay cut of their CEO, and that was without poor performance or firing workers.
It's not like he doesn't have any agency in this.
If he's going to catch heat for it anyway, he might as well take what he's contractually entitled to.
If I am working for a company where the role I am in has a statistical likelihood that I will be fired in the near future, I am going to take every comp dollar I can get and not offer any compensation sacrifices for optics sake.
That is true of any CEO pay, though.
It was also a pay cut from a TCTC (Tim Cook total compensation) high of $99 million the year before, which seems mindbogglingly high but also make him out to be a bargain in comparison to Pichai.
Imagine CEO pay wasn't high.
They would still be reaping a huge portion of the benefit of shareholder-friendly (and less employee-friendly) policies, but escaping the blame.
Effectively, the amount of capital appreciation they've squeezed from layoffs dwarfs the CEO pay package, without any scrutiny.
According to this†, he made $99.4 million last year, but will get $49 million this year.
That's 80% less than Pichai.
† https://www.hollywoodreporter.com/business/business-news/app...
What you’ve said is nonsensical. Being the victim of some harsh words forgotten the next day while never having to work another day in your life is not any kind of responsibility.
These are strong words, and you didn't back them up at all.
The comment you're replying to did not mention responsibility at all. Responsibility and blame are different things.
If I were a little less charitable I'd have said your comment was nonsensical.
Do well? Get a massive bonus!
Do poorly? Get a massive bonus!
Do incredibly poorly? Leave with a golden parachute (aka massive bonus).
Sundar is getting new equity grants based on his "performance". That's not the same.
As the ultimate owners of the company by shareholder votes, they approved the compensation of Sundar, and are the decision makers.
Hah!
If I’m ignoring morality and just pretending I own the company and want to be richer, my opinion would be: if I think there is someone out there who will do a better job than my CEO and they are available, hire them no matter how much it costs. Whatever I’m paying them is peanuts compared to their impact on the company’s market cap. Nowhere in my option space is “keep the same sub-par CEO but pay them less”, that’s penny-wise and pound-foolish thinking.
On the other hand, perhaps you could. Just dividing the numbers out doesn’t account for whatever value they’re producing.
Btw if you have some repeatable mechanism for proving the suitability of CEO candidates, maybe you should be doing executive recruiting for a liking.
In reality, there are few people who have had to opportunity to show their ability to run Google. You have the small set of people who ran tech companies as big as Google, or who ran big parts of Google. Those people are in high demand, which is why hundreds of millions of dollars is the market rate for the most appealing of the bunch.
* How do you find one of these guys in the haystack with any degree of confidence?
* How much time would one of them need to build a professional network at the same level as Pichai?
FWIW, I do find these compensation packages obscene. Just working out same thinly disguised math.
Do you think Blackrock has substantially different motivations? Like, come on.
I call it "Not Everyone Is Motivated Solely By Money."
Is your position that the institutional investors which comprise >60% of GOOG's common shares (eg Blackrock) have a significantly different motivation?
Of course not. Don't be ridiculous.
This is exploitation. The owning class for the owning class. The rich benefit and the workers are left exploited. Larry, Sergey, Pichai, they are all participating and benefiting at the cost of the workers. Any in-fighting and rivalry is at best a spectacle. At the end of the day, they all go home to the wealth, earned by their workers but enjoyed by the owners, and the owners alone, whether you call them bosses or shareholders, they are all simply exploiters.
Second, Google’s workers famously include many many contractors who do not get the same benefits as Google’s direct employees. This is exploitation.
Third, the exploitation runs deeper than just google workers. Their customers include companies which are paying a bunch of money to use their services. This is money which otherwise could have gone to the developers of those customers. Those workers are also exploited by google’s bosses and shareholders.
Good grief.
The highest paid workers on the planet, work for google. You should spread this communist blather at the proper place, coffee shops where workers aren't paid a living wage.
Not people able to retire wealthy, is they invest their salary coreectly.
Talk about entitlement.
I don't think anyone here is advocating for cutting Pichai's pay to $500k or something, but nearly a quarter billion dollars? JFC
For me “Market rate” is just something the owning class tells us to gaslight us into accepting our exploitation. They created this market, they control this market, and exploiters go on exploiting.
What benefit does a board of directors have over helping out the CEO (an employee as well) vs customers and employees?
> What benefit does a board of directors have over helping out the CEO (an employee as well) vs customers and employees?
Note I say workers. Even though a CEO is technically “employed” by the company, they are still very much a boss, a part of the owning class, and part of the problem. When the pitchforks come up, they will very much be directed at CEOs. This is why CEOs help out their fellow bosses and shareholders. Class solidarity is very much a reality for the owning and ruling classes.
They "generate" the value by putting software on multi-billion dollar server farms, while sitting in buildings on top of billions worth of real estate. Did they pay for those and keep them running?
Stop wanting everyone to be as poor as you god damn. I want employees to make as much as they can, not all the wealth concentrate in a capital class. WTF is wrong with people?
Also I was thinking in terms of math applied to percentiles and other statistics, which don't change with inflation.
Are you really going to say it's crab bucket if I say a number like "a million dollars" and say it should apply to both income and capital gains? Maybe even a lower number for capital gains, if I'm being feisty?
Well paid google workers are still workers and deserve our solidarity. Making a distinction among workers between lower classes, and middle and upper class only serves to divide us, destroy our solidarity, and for our bosses to keep exploiting us.
And why shouldn't I have some solidarity with an owner of a business that has 30k more assets than debts and personally makes 40k a year?
I think income and wealth are better distinguishers than the role you have.
Maybe they are micromanaging nightmare bosses, I wouldn't know. But from all I have seen, from the very start of Pichais tenure, he definitely deserves a huge chunk of the blame.
I don't think that Google's market cap increased by ~$890B because of Pichai, it increased despite him.
His pay is likely set years in advance, based on performance metrics. Sundar is riding the ads wave to huge payouts in spite of his massive failures, Google Plus, Stadia, devices, especially ChromeOS tablets, mismanaging Cloud, and on, and on...
Literally his job. End of story.
Unpopular opinion, but he should. Google has pretty much been uninventing cesspool since he became the CEO. The only thing that are up are profits.
They control ~51% of voting power with shares thanks to owning ~85% of class B shares. They have had the benefit of someone else running the company for 8 years - and increasing the value of it - and now, when things are not looking great, it’s Sundar Pichai who gets the blame, and the focus on his compensation.
The biggest winners of Pichai’s leadership have objectively been the shareholders: Google’s market cap increased by ~$890B since he took over as CEO in 2015, tripling the market cap/stock price of the company.
Larry and Sergey run this show: they simply hired someone else to do it for them. When things go well: they profit. When not so well - like now - someone else is on the hook and is the person criticised for how things go at Google; and it’s not them.