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Comment by Grustaf | Hacker News Reader

Put it this way. In the last 5 years Tim Cook has created $1900 b in shareholder value. If you divide that by 160000 you get $12 m. Now I don’t know how many phones a foxconn worker can make per year, but I do think it’s fair to assume they do not each create much more than $2 m in value annually.

Or another way to see it. While creating 2 trillion dollars of value for shareholders, he has been paid about 1.5 b. As a shareholder I think that’s very fair compensation.

So relative to value creation, nobody can claim that he’s overpaid. A deeper questions is if it’s reasonable for anyone to own a billion dollars. I don’t think so, but Tim Cook has deserved the money more than most.

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Apple has how many employees? Cook was involved, but clearly is not the sole force contributing to that shareholder value.

Wow! Are you saying Musk and a regular employee in Tesla are the same? I am blown away. What do you think Satya Nadella’s role is in Microsoft’s revival after Ballmer?

The same? No. Off by a factor of thousands or millions? Unlikely.

I am not insisting that people should all earn the same amount of money. CEOs can absolutely provide a unique and valuable role and have more direct influence on shareholder value than almost any other laborer.

I am insisting that attributing all of the change in a stock price to a CEO is not an accurate representation of their role or labor.

> In the last 5 years Tim Cook has created $1900 b in shareholder value.

That's just obviously not the case unless Tim is the only person working at Apple. All employees contributed that and it's perfectly reasonable to discuss how these rewards should be distributed, even if they should be distributed to shareholders at all.

No matter how you look at it, a CEO that earns less than 0.1% of the shareholder value created under his watch can’t reasonably be called overpaid.

“No matter how you look at it”? I question this because I personally am fairly persuaded that, if the CEO is not the only employee at the company, but the CEO is stated to earn “shareholder value under his watch” and then a portion being 0.1%, but another employee, say a manager or a director who also likely “created shareholder value” but earned 0.0000000001% or some other ridiculous fraction I would indeed question what makes the CEO different from the other employees such that they deserve so much more than the other employees that contributed to the shareholder value generation.

Just compare with other tech companies. I haven’t checked but I don’t think 0.1% is high, my guess is that it’s very very low, but I could be wrong.

People seem to be really keen to forget that the CEO is an employee too. Should the shareholders profit exclusively when in effect the CEO is their representative?

The argument isn't that he should be paid less, the real argument is that the general day to day employees should be paid more. The money doesn't come out of the CEOs pocket in a publicly traded org.

It depends entirely if he's actually responsible for that created value. Maybe he didn't actually do anything special that anyone else couldn't have also done. In that case why would he deserve that much money?

While that is obviously a ludicrous idea, as a shareholder I don't really care if someone else also might have been able to do it. The fact is that Tim Cook DID preside over perhaps the most monumental value creation in corporate history, so I don't begrudge him the money.

To be honest, I wouldn't even blink if he was paid 10 times more, and I don't even like him.

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