exitreturn123

You make a/the compelling counter-argument.

I still think there is a market driver (China TAM) that motivates the behavior as much as anything here. I guess we'll see if the slope is slippery or not.

I work closely with Apple so need to post anonymously.

I believed everything in this until something that happened in late July this past summer.

In China, their fastest-growing market, China demanded all secure messaging and VPN apps be removed from the App Store and Apple complied.[1]

So privacy matters, unless it's in your fastest-growing market.

I intend to discuss with Tim next time I see him.

1: https://techcrunch.com/2017/07/29/apple-removes-vpn-apps-fro...

Yes, I work at a very large public tech company now (40,000+ employees). I'm a senior executive in the company but two levels below CEO.

I would guess:

  4000 people make > $500,000 / year
  1000 people make > $1,000,000 / year
  250 people make > $2,000,000 / year
  50 people make > $4,000,000 / year
  ~7 people make > $8,000,000 / year (the executive team)

This includes stock and cash and bonus. All in.

I do believe that I will never feel as rich as I did when I went from negative net worth to zero. That liberating feeling was amazing, as it's all upside after that.

You'll get there, and it'll feel so good when you do.

Making a throwaway for this.

My annual pre-tax income from work is about $2,500,000.

My annual passive pre-tax income is about $1,200,000. This is 100% derived from investment returns from an exit I had a few years ago from a startup I was with.

I spend about $400,000/year (after tax) of that.

Here's the kicker: Nothing makes you feel more poor than being worth about $40m in cash while you hang out with billionaires and live in NYC or SF.