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Bud

You don't actually know Tim Cook's salary, do you?

Please stop pretending that you do.

Hint: the vast majority of his compensation is, and has always been, via stock grants.

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> In 2020, Tim Cook's compensation included $3M in base pay, a $10.7M bonus, and $250.3M in stock grants.

You do understand that, because Apple is a public company, all of this information is literally public knowledge, right?

If you'd like to argue that stock grants are not part of a person's salary, that is a reasonable interpretation of the definition of "salary", but hardly relevant to the broader point, which is clearly not to assert that Timmy should open up his checkbook, but rather to illustrate how incredibly inane it is to suggest that a few hundred bucks a week for an hourly interpreter means anything at the scale Apple operates at.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-highest-paid-ceos/

You do know that high earners play this game to avoid the sort of tax liabilities ordinary people have to pay? They aren't nobler by taking a $1 salary.

Yes. The fact remains that Tim Cook could not do what was claimed out of his salary. Period, paragraph. Just as obvious: Tim Cook wouldn't do this if he weren't confident in his leadership. Apple stock is up more than 10x since he took over.

Tim Cook was paid $264m in 2020 [0]

Apple has 4,291 employees in the entire state of New York [1]

That's $61,500 per person.

The average salary for an "Apple Genius" (one of the people who work at apple stores?) in New York City is $53,230

[0] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=28573768

[1] https://www.apple.com/job-creation/

[2] https://www.payscale.com/research/US/Job=Apple_Genius/Salary...

Apple employs 147,000 people directly at the end of FY2020. That's $1,800 per employee that's going to Tim Cook, all up. Which is high, but it is what the owners (via the board of directors) think he's worth.

Tim Cook's salary is what we were talking about. So no. Please don't misstate your facts especially when the source you are citing was quite clear.

Only the most pedantic arsehole would assume that money given to someone doesn't count as 'salary'

Actually, if you bothered to look into this for more than two seconds, which you obviously didn't, you'd discover that Tim Cook has been receiving far less TOTAL compensation than all his peers, as well, for a long time now.

And that's without taking his performance into account, which is, of course, obviously the best performance by any CEO in the world.

So I'm pedantic and an asshole? Fuck that. Two can play at that game: you're a lazy jerk who paints sloppily with a broad brush.

The claim was that Tim Cook's salary is enough to pay for "every apple salary in new york"

Given that equating "salary" and "total compensation" is a reasonable interpretation, and by the context the talk was about front line apple store workers rather than high level developers, the figures add up (and then some)

I'm making no judgement on Cook's compensation or value, just confirming the numbers, but you seem to take that as a personal attack.

You're also leaving out the part that the year in question included a very large stock grant that Cook doesn't get every year; in most years his total compensation would be dramatically smaller, even if you assume he could magically liquidate all stock without depressing the stock price and also pay zero tax on that.

As for you pretending to be shocked that I considered your comments a personal attack, um, er, uh, you called me a "pedantic asshole". I think that qualifies.

Does the argument meaningfully change if you replace the word "salary" with "compensation"? If not, please stop pretending that you made an interesting point.

Yes, it actually does, because the value of his compensation, 98% or so of which is in stock, would be worth over 10 times less right now if it were not for Tim Cook's performance as CEO. That makes a rather big difference, in my view.

It also changes the argument meaningfully in a second way: liquidity. Tim Cook can't just go sell all that stock right now, since that would cause a rather big panic and also rob him of a lot of its value. Which means he could not actually pay all those folks' salaries.

Whether my point is "interesting" is up to you. Whether it's factual isn't. It's factual.

Really? What amazing things did Tim Cook do to single-handedly make the company 10x more valuable that another CEO wouldn't have?

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