Comment by gervase | Hacker News Reader

Comment by gervase | Hacker News Reader

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I feel like it's a little disingenuous to list unexercised stock and option grants as part of the overall compensation, since these are directly related to the future performance of the company itself (as led by the listed CEO, presumably). I would have liked to see the option to differentiate between total compensation more granularly, including by exercised grants.

I understand that that "2.3 billion" number makes for shocking value and therefore a great headline, supporting the narrative that they're looking to construct, but the way the raw data is presented actively obfuscates readers from exploring the data and forming their own interpretations.

When I see a dataset with a 4 million percent increase YOY, I would probably classify that as an outlier, not as the representative value I report for the whole dataset.

Edit: That's not to say their narrative is wrong (that is, CEOs may absolutely be overpaid), just that the way they presented it feels misleading to me.

Agreed.

On a similar note, I bring thing this kind of thing up whenever people talk about how much money Jeff Bezos has.

While Bezos has a lot of cash for sure, he doesn't have $160B like news headlines make it out to be. Most of his "money" is tied up in stocks, and if he were to try to cash out all of it, it would tank the stock prices pretty hard, and he'd only get a fraction of it.

No one is saying Bezos has $160B in cash. At that level liquid cash doesn't really matter anyways, since there's no way you could even spend that much.

What he does have, though, is $160B worth of influence, a large part of which comes from the money tied up in stocks.

The difference here is realized vs. realizable pay: http://www.execcomp.org/Issues/Issue/pay-for-performance/rea.... The realizable number is more often used when comparing to peer companies. The reason is not generally to get larger numbers for headlines. But indeed, as you say: "One drawback of realizable pay is that because it combines actual pay with a current snapshot of future incentive pay, it may differ significantly from the comparison of pay actually received at the end of the performance period to the performance over that period."

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