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Comment by DasIch | Hacker News Reader

> 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.

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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.

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.

“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.

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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