Nah, chances are the guy was born rich. These kind of management positions in Germany are reserved for rich people. In fact according to his bio it appears that he went from doing a PhD in IT to being head of a department at SAP and then a few years later he is CTO. That's connections and nepotism, and you don't get those connections without being already rich.

He did his PhD on the Hasso Plattner Institute under Hasso Plattner himself (SAP co-founder). That secured on the connection part.

Having had a professional episode in Germany I avoided SAP like HIV and luckily I got involved with neither.

I mean it could also be exceptional competence among key customers. This certainly doesn’t have to be nepotism

Going from PhD, not even PostDoc with zero industry experience, to being Head of Department at SAP without connections is unlikely.

He probably already started working for SAP during his PhD or even his PhD is a project from SAP itself.

I mean postdoc isn't necessarily a good thing, arguably it's a bad thing. You do postdocs while you wait for something better to come up.

if you make 100k a year that payout is 71 years worth of your wages. absurd.

Before Uncle Sam gets his cut. Much less after the robbery. How much of the 7 million be sucked up by Germany’s taxes?

If structured properly, Onkel Franz takes equally or less than Uncle Sam.

Regular folks on payroll would have to pay half of it, but boys in cashmere sweaters probably somehow pay 0%.

Universal truth

no you need to pay taxes on the 100k. The 7.1M payout can easily pay a tax lawyer to find some convenient loophole to keep most of it.

What would you do with that amount of money at that age?

average worker will never reach that kind of retirement payout. early or late

CxO get way too much

"Should be" is a joke, right?

You can pull off over $200k/yr and never touch the principal. If you can let it sit for a decade it will ~double in terms of purchasing to just a hair under $14M. Another ten years on top of that and you're retiring at 58 (still "early") with $27.5M in today's-dollars purchasing power.

Personally I'd probably just live off $200k starting today but there's a hell of an argument for retiring before 50 and still having ~$350k/yr in purchasing power.