Apple chief Tim Cook faces shareholder revolt over $99M pay package | Hacker News Reader

Apple chief Tim Cook faces shareholder revolt over $99M pay package

theguardian.com

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JFC, this article is so stupid. It's equity in a company that's worth 3 trillion dollars.

Would the shareholders like to get the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, or Yahoo, or Gateway, or Palm, or jawbone?

If the CEO of the world's first trillion dollar company can't make a lot of money, then who can?

It's a free market.

> If the CEO of the world's first trillion dollar company can't make a lot of money, then who can?

Isn't this completely contradicted by

> It's a free market.

Wouldn't you expect that a company operating on free market principles went for a good but cheap option? Instead when you look at these companies it is always people born rich and well connected. Even better when you include Theranos, you can have a family history of con artists and the people in these circles will still throw money at you for decades. I would say the market for CEOs is about as free as an Italian getting a pair of custom concrete boots by the local mafia.

Edit: Just checked Cook actually doesn't seem to come from a family that rich. So used to it and when I write a comment I manage to refer to the one guy who wasn't born rich.

When the news broke Steve Ballmer was stepping down Microsoft stock jumped $2 billion. If it’s possible to be worth -$2 billion it’s possible to be worth $100 million.

It remember that is was far more than that.

Without having invested too much time into this, Microsoft's market cap back then was around $270bn, and the stock rose by around 7% on 2013-08-23, the day is retirement plans were announced. So the stock jumped close to $20bn.

Historical prices according to Yahoo on 2013-08-23: closed at 34.75, previous close was 32.39.

I haven’t read the article, but I assume it is 100mm annually not a lifetime achievement award.

> Wouldn't you expect that a company operating on free market principles went for a good but cheap option?

In an ideal competitive free market, there is no “good, but cheap” option; the marginal cost equals the marginal value delivered.

Not really. In this case there is also a huge serving of sunk cost fallacy: how will we cope if Tim leaves?

What unique value does Tim bring to Apple that someone else can’t? Apple has been missing Steve Jobs’ pedantic attention to detail for a while, perhaps Apple would actually be better off with someone else? But they aren’t going to try because they don’t want to spend the effort looking.

Apple is the first company in the world to hit 3t and under Steve's care. Saying they haven't replaced him because they haven't bothered looking is absurd. Why bother fucking with the most valuable company in the world. That's like saying LeBron James is only on the team because no ones bothered to find anyone better.

Also, free market doesn’t mean you’re not allowed to get upset about anything that happens.

Yes thinking that good CEOs would be cheap in a free market shows you have essentially ZERO understanding of basic economics, just like the author who thinks there is a specific ratio that CEO pay is not allowed to be relative to the average employee, which is obviously weighed by the large number of lower level employees.

The fact that Tim Cook ONLY costs 1447 times what an average employee costs is a real bargain.

There are 10s of 1000s of average employees. There was effectively only one Steve Jobs until Tim Cook proved he could be Tim Cook, and as a shareholder I would not want you to try and nickle&dime the guy who has created so much value for shareholders.

Yes, the CEO is the chief value creator because ultimately he decides who remains at Apple, he sets the overall strategy and HE has to take full and final responsibility in front of shareholders for all results good or bad.

Mr Middle Manager or Mr Programmer is not going to be called in by the board to explain any problems with profits or growth. Mr Programmer is important but there are more people that can do his job as well as him, as there are people who have a proven track record running an Apple or similar.

Shareholders that buy Apple stock do so at least in part because Tim Cook is the CEO. Sure I first look at the business fundamentals and the valuation, but Tim Cook's proven track record is a major part.

Go watch Buffet interviews on YouTube to hear how highly he rates Tim Cook.

I've never heard Warren Argue that Tim is overpaid, and yet Warren is a very large shareholder.

It's easy for people with very little stake in Apple to have strong opinions about what the Apple CEO should be paid.

If shareholders buy Apple stock in part because Tim Cook is the CEO and not some new unproven person of dubious merit, how much is he worth paying? A lot

I hold some Apple stock, and I'm not revolting.

I’m glad you’re not revolting. That sounds like it would be a bummer.

I do shower at least once a month.

Yes, yes, but ... can shareholders get the same Tim Cook value for less? Would Cook hand in his resignation if the board says that let's halve this bonus package? I guess Cook might lose a bit of morale, but it's not like he'll just post on r/antiwork send an email to everyone and walk away...

> Wouldn't you expect that a company operating on free market principles went for a good but cheap option?

No, I expect it to do what the market can bear. “The market“ can be a single person and single entity, a trade between two market participants where of course, any price is a market-good price.

Good simply meaning a transaction occurred and settled, while bad meaning it did not. Those are my expectations. Doesn't mean thats what I would do or negotiate or whether I would mildly chuckle at what was negotiated.

> Wouldn't you expect that a company operating on free market principles went for a good but cheap option?

I do not follow that logic. Why should they choose to make less money?

So just to get this straight: you argued that Tim Cook only got there via his rich family, even before you knew whether that was true.

I may be a bit jaded, a lot of rich people like to pretend they where poor and that their success is entirely self made. Stories like Theranos reinforce the image that the social circles are mostly static and unchanging no matter what the people involved are up to. I checked a bit late in this case but oce I saw some sparse evidence to the contrary in this case I corrected myself.

Question is - does he need to?

I don't know about you, or Cook, but where i live, everybody needs. When you don't need they look at you like at an alien. They even teach children in school that there are 2 important things in life: money and power.

Back to Apple: if they start to look at 99 Milions $ maybe you shall search for another supplier. Just saying.

Who or what determines what someone needs to earn?

How much do you earn? Could you survive if you got paid 15% less? How about 50% less? Well, if you don't need it then, how about we just cut your pay based on what some arbitrary person decides you "need".

Well in this case, the board and shareholders.

They don't determine how much Cook or anyone needs to earn, they determine how much they are willing to pay to get the CEO they want.

> Who or what determines what someone needs to earn?

As the song says: "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends"

Question is - is it anyone's business what a company pays its CEO beyond those who own it?

I know of one entity whose business it is; the government. They could heavily tax him (or find new ways to do it), or even legislate top allowed compensations.

They don't do that now, but it's perfectly within their rights to do so if politics takes a hard left.

> but it's perfectly within their rights to do so if politics takes a hard left.

I don't see that happening the USA.

But we’re talking about pay, not taxes.

Of course the government could tax him heavily - that’s not the question at hand.

Shareholder vote surely is "those who own it".

Yes, it's the shareholders business for they own the company.

That’s why I said “beyond those who own it?”

Theoretically, no. But look what a beautiful thread is on HN. Religion has thought mere mortals to be interested in the life of gods.

Is it?

Its free market and the shareholders can say what they want its not a dictatorship.

Apple's stock is up over 1000% in the 10 years since Tim Cook became CEO. Over that time it went from a $350B company to a $2.7T company. He oversaw the creation of over $2T in value and his net worth is in the low single digit billions? If anything he's underpaid for the job he's doing.

Always when these arguments come up I wonder: is there actually a tangible way to measure how much of this was because of Cook (or whatever other CEO)? Maybe he is just riding a wave of success?! Maybe someone else would have the exact same results?

To me it always seems that the success of a company is projected onto its upper management in an unhealthy way. Maybe I am just clueless however.

There is no accurate way to measure how much was because of Cook. Clearly he made some decisions as CEO that put the company on a very profitable path.

But the same could be said of any job. Pay a programmer $400k. Was the work completed really worth that much?

I wonder, did the regular employees see their income go up 1000% in this same timespan?

If they invested their money in the company stock, certainly yes. The basic tenet of investment is simple: no risk, no reward.

FTA: "The vote against Cook’s pay package would be advisory only and Apple’s board would not be compelled to act on it."

It is hard to judge the $99M package without comparing to other CEO's earning.

Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made about $50M in 2021.

Google CEO Pichai will receive a $2M salary, plus a $240 million stock package that’s set to take effect in 2020. The stock will be granted over three years and is tied to performance targets. Assuming everything goes well that is $80M / year.

An article from Bloomberg on CEO package. Just absurd numbers.

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

Nice how the shareholders "revolt" over $99M in pay, but selling out the American people and workers by offshoring all manufacturing to what is essentially slave labor in China is A-OK. Until they make a fuss about that, they can cry us all a river.

$99M sounds very cheap to me for such success.

What the heck do they want more than Apple level success?

Agree. I think you have to look at it as how much a foolish CEO would cost the company.

This is such a different situation than a golden parachute for a leader who ran the company into the ground. Basically the opposite situation.

I think the problem is that Apple is just so giant at this point it is hard to get your head around. 7X the size of Walmart or Toyota. The idea Walmart could triple in size and not even be close is not at all intuitive.

Paying to not use slave labor is a start.

99M in dividends?

Apple pays somewhere around 13800M in dividends.

13899M fits the Apple pricing model better.

Cook should do the ultimate Fuck You to shareholders by moving to Puerto Rico under Act 60 to make it new grants that year nearly tax free, with very short vesting periods. Vesting time period is not regulated, so there is alot you can do on the board or as CEO to yourself.

I'm going to guess this is mostly due to options which means he made a ton of money because Apple stock went up which means stockholders also made a ton of money?

I can totally see why Tim is worth it. It was his teams genius idea to take away ports and brake the keyboard design so they could charge double when they fixed them. Brilliant.

$99m is enough to buy 200 people a new home, that would take normally take them 20+ years to pay off. So about the equivalent of 4,000 years of labour of the average middle class person. To put that in perspective, Jesus the carpenter would still have 2,000 years of labour left.

> I can totally see why Tim is worth it. It was his teams genius idea to take away ports and brake the keyboard design so they could charge double when they fixed them. Brilliant.

He's good at marketing. That's why people buy Apple - for the real and percieved value.

> $99m is enough to buy 200 people a new home, that would take normally take them 20+ years to pay off.

Here some will dissagree. There are Malibu homes, there are Frankfurt homes and there are favelas homes.

> So about the equivalent of 4,000 years of labour of the average middle class person. To put that in perspective, Jesus the carpenter would still have 2,000 years of labour left.

That's because he spends his days in meetings. "Why are programmers non-productive? Because their time is wasted in meetings."

That's really not obscene. When Jobs died everyone, including users on this site, was talking about how he would ruin the company despite his best intentions. I would say he did not. And come on, it's a $2 trillion company? That's less than a thousandth of the market cap.

„Following the resignation of Apple founder Steve Jobs, incoming CEO Tim Cook called a meeting of shareholders and members of the press Thursday morning to announce that he envisioned printers as the company’s future. “Laser, ink-jet, double-sided, color, black-and-white—the future of technology is in printers. I am absolutely convinced of that,”” - https://www.theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-...

How I would love a printer that just works

Stop it right now. This is not a site where you indulge your nuttiest, most insane fantasies. Seriously, though, I got one of those reservoir printers and it has finally solved all my printer issues. It cost about $380 a year ago but the great thing is I can ignore it for months at a time, then just turn it on and use it when I need to. Unlike the cheaper printers, it doesn’t dry out and start functioning.

What do you actually print, though?

I don't own a printer nor scanner - and I haven't done-so for almost 10 years now. If I need to print or scan something I'd use my (pre-WFH) workplace's copier room or (as now) use my town's library's facilities.

...fortunately I haven't needed to print or scan anything at short-notice, though most "scanning" I do thesedays is through some document-scanning app on my phone which gives good-enough results.

I know plenty of people want to be able to print their own photos at home, but I'm utterly unconvinced that any home inkjet or even color-laser printer is going to give results anywhere near as good as a commercial print place.

And of course, there's the unavoidable HP printer-ink-costs-more-than-human-blood problem - I find it marvelous that HP has been the number 1 factor in driving people away from buying home printers.

The new Apple slogan: "Print (money) different".

The new Apple printer will have only one button, one paper size and one colour.

The Onion is satire; that's not a real quote.

It’s a real quote of satire from a particular point in time.

I don’t get your point. You’re quoting The Onion.

Yes. This was funny at the time so it shows what everyone was thinking when this guy was named as a replacement for Jobs.

Quoting satire is useful - I don’t think anyone today would find that piece funny today because Cook has really worked out his own brand and image, on par with Jobs himself some could argue.

I don’t get your point. This is America's finest news source.

Apple made $34B in profit (net income) in 2021. Cook is getting 0.3% of that as CEO.

He can have $100m only when he figures out how to take 30% of the income of all the iPhone users... and he gets them to thank him for it.

I wonder who they consider "Apple employees". After doing the math, they are claiming that the average Apple employee makes 68K a year. I don't know if I buy that.

> His total remuneration package was worth $98.7m in 2021, compared with $14.8m a year earlier. Cook’s pay was 1,447 times that of the average Apple employee, according to a filing disclosed in January.

So what's the argument here, that he should be paid less, or that the average employee should be paid more? One would expect the CEO _always_ get paid more than the average employee, a large difference does not mean inequity. For example, if you are the CEO of a supermarket, where employees are paid just above minimum wage on average, the CEO would likely be getting _much_ more.

> In January, it briefly became the first company to be valued at $3tn, it became the first $1tn company in 2018.

> Last year, Cook took home $3m in salary, and received $82.3m in stock awards, $12m for hitting targets, and another $1.4m for air travel, retirement plan contributions, insurance premiums and other contributions.

Sounds like excellent value for money. The stock awards mean the better the job he does, the better his payout. They also come with strings attached (as Elon Musk learned when trying to cash-out). They also have other strings, for example with John Schnatter, who I believe was forced to sell off a majority share in the company he built [1]:

> In addition to preventing him from accessing information, the corporation also implemented a "poison pill" strategy in order to limit Schnatter's chances of buying back a majority stake in the company.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Schnatter

> Cook’s pay was 1,447 times that of the average Apple employee, according to a filing disclosed in January.

Numbers like that are so silly to me.

Only 1 person can be CEO, let alone CEO of a multi-trillion dollar company.

How many other employees at Apple (the ones we're comparing how minuscule their pay compared to the CEO) can run the company as well as he has? Vision, implementation, everything.

If they can't do the job, don't talk about how unfair it is that he gets paid 1,447x more than them.

Obviously I'm being hyperbolic to set somebody up for some kind of "you're missing the point" rage response. I do genuinely look forward to learning what I'm missing here.

I'm worth nothing compared to Jeff Bezos... because I didn't invent and execute Amazon... Cool stat?

> How many other employees at Apple (the ones we're comparing how minuscule their pay compared to the CEO) can run the company as well as he has? Vision, implementation, everything.

That's a good question!

I'd speculate that, if we could re-run history with different CEO's for Apple, some might do worse than the current-CEO while some might do better. The huge, undeniable advantage a sitting-CEO has over their hypothetical competition is that the sitting-CEO was the one who got the chance to try.

Not to deny that a sitting-CEO had to do stuff to get selected. But if their main advantage over those who weren't selected was that they managed to get selected, then presumably we'd have to credit them with having won the selection-process, not with out-performing their hypothetical competition at the job.

Would this be a version of the fundamental attribution error?

The counter argument is that Tim Cook is not 1447x more responsible for apple’s success than the average apple employee, because there are no doubt many people within apple who contributed greatly to that success. It is also not a given nobody could take over the CEO job, because people were predicting the downfall of apple when Cook took over from Jobs, and he proved them wrong.

This may be true, but can we argue that founder- primary shareholders who own > 10% of companies and worth billions like Bezos, Musk, Zuckerberg contribute > 10,000X of average employee. This point can be taken in any direction and a question that society should answer with more data and rationality.

I can agree about Musk being essential to the success of his companies. Zuckerberg strikes me as more of a "right place at the right time" kind of guy and many people in the same place would have done as well or better. Bezos ... I don't know what to think of that guy.

Just because someone is a billionaire doesn't mean they owe those billions to their own skill. Untangling the web of who contributed what and where luck came into play is hard. Reasonable people can disagree, and this is why the outrage exists about CEO pay. The people that are outraged see the CEO's as profiting from the hard work of their workforce, and not contributing in proportion to their pay. Again, reasonable people can disagree about that, and it may be impossible to objectively determine what the truth is.

It’s not about whether anybody at Apple could take over. It’s whether they could do as good a job. Doing 1% better than the next candidate is worth a lot when you’re running a company worth over a trillion.

Well, what if there is someone waiting in the wings who could do an even better job? Cook did better than Jobs, and nobody expected him to.

Let's extend this further and apply it to the president of the US. Would you agree that the president should be paid dozens of million or even a billion USD each year because they kept the trillion USD economy going?

The US president has a lot more responsibility than a CEO, including the prevention of eradication of life on Earth.

Given the US has to fund its operations via debt, I wouldn’t expect them to pay their President much. If they were making tens/hundreds of billions in profits a year then sure, give them a big fat check for eliminating the national deficit.

You can choose not to invest in Apple. You don't have a choice in paying for the President's salary.

I wouldn't have any issue with giving the president a salary of 10 million/year. We as a society really need to do a better job to put our most qualified individuals in running society instead of having them optimize ad revenue.

If only there was a clear indication that higher pay == better qualified candidates

Sorry if sarcasm doesn't travel over the internet, but are you saying that the correlation between high pay and competence is weak at best?

Either way, given how both US parties spend on the presidential election more than Amazon on Lord of the Rings, I do think the winner should get a big fat paycheck. I can only see this reducing conflicts of interest, or at least making them more public.

Unless something's changed, I don't believe the president of the US makes business decisions for all economic activity in the US.

> For example, if you are the CEO of a supermarket, where employees are paid just above minimum wage on average, the CEO would likely be getting _much_ more.

"Ideally" - if the company can only afford to pay employees minimum wage, the CEO would also be paid lower.

In 2021 Tescos employs 367,321 people [1] with a revenue of $75.022B (~£55B) [2]. Assuming employees are paid £8.91 an hour [3] for about 30 hours a week, for 52 weeks, is ~£5.1 in wages alone. ~10% of their revenue (at least) is spent on wages alone. A significant proportion of the remaining ~90% revenue will be spent on produce, transport, stores and other operational costs.

In 2020, Tesco chief executive Davis Lewis was paid £6.42m [4], which the article points out "is 355 times that of the lowest-paid average employee". If we take £3m away from him and 'share the wealth', the other 367,320 employees get a bonus of £8.17 per year, or an extra half-penny per hour.

So, you have £3m to spend to increase company turnover - do you give each of the low invested interest employees a half-penny for their efforts, or do you give the chief executive manager £3m and motivate him to increase profits?

It sucks, but it really seems obvious where the money has to be spent. I imagine the situation with Apple to not be much more different.

[1] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSCDY/tesco/number...

[2] https://www.macrotrends.net/stocks/charts/TSCDY/tesco/revenu...

[3] https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/minimum-wage-rate...

[4] https://www.theguardian.com/business/2020/may/13/tesco-chief...

It's good value for money if you can demonstrate that he's creating a hefty portion of the company's value. That may well be, but I see no good reason to assume that just because he is the CEO he is actually demonstrably responsible for creating 10x the value of an average Apple employee, never mind 100x or 1000x+. What evidence exists to show that he has made the company any money at all?

One way to find out is to have all the underpaid employees quit and form an Apple competitor, Pear, and see how well that does.

(This is not an unreasonable suggestion. People quit and start their own companies all the time. Some prove they were underpaid, some prove they were overpaid.)

Hehehe. But how do you know who is underpaid! The same question I was asking about Cook applies to every employee. ...But it feels reasonable to impose at least a somewhat higher burden of proof when someone is about to get paid such a large multiple of the average

It’s just that, when you’re the guy that decides everyone’s salary that also has a heavy role in determining your own salary, it looks like you’re flagrantly abusing your power.

Ideally, CEOs would be paid entirely in stock options to align their incentives with the company’s. It seems that Cook was paid in stock awards, which is better than straight cash at least.

How many votes does ISS functionally control?

I don’t really think Tim Cook (or any company officer anywhere) deserves or needs this kind of comp. That said, I can’t imagine Apple could have performed any better in the last year. I can only assume this is some sort of attempt at a strong arm move to negotiate profit sharing or to get Apple to stop activism on some front.

Government prints money, causes massive asset inflation, then people complain about the dollar value of the massively inflated assets that executives get paid in. Their pay didn't go up, the value of the dollar went down.

That's ~487,328 shares of AAPL at the last closing price. It would have been about $55.8m at last year's valuation. According to the article, his pay last year was $14.8m. Clearly he didn't get as much stock, maybe some vesting, or multi-year earn-out got paid out this year?

Raise interest rates and Tim Cook's compensation will plummet. Journalists and politicians need to stop quoting stock values like they're cash. It's incredibly disingenuous. I guess it gets lots of outrage clicks, though.

Exactly; the government pumped the stock market. Performance-based compensation is a concept based on monetary base stability. A CEO is demonstrably successful if they are able to allocate resources from their competitors, not from an infinite supply of free money.

Unless you'd like to make the case that we had 600% inflation in the last year, your explanation does not hold up. (Skim the article. He's poised to make 6 times more than last year)

But even then, compensation packages are usually specified in dollars, not numbers of shares.

And even if that weren't the case, Apple shares only increased 40% over the last year. ~20% since the fall, were compensation packages are usually hammered out.

So, no, it's not inflation, as much as you'd like to complain about fiat money.

> Unless you'd like to make the case that we had 600% inflation in the last year, your explanation does not hold up. (Skim the article. He's poised to make 6 times more than last year)

Sorry, I edited my comment a few times after posting as I looked up more information and it now addresses this.

It doesn't make much sense that he randomly got 6x more than last year. This was probably a stock payout of some multi-year compensation package, combined with inflated stock prices. But little nuances like that get in the way of the "eat the rich" muckraking that places like the Guardian want to push so I imagine they don't spend a lot of time investigating the details.

Which publications take on Cook’s pay would you prefer I read?

If you’re an Apple shareholder or employee I think you should be able to request the details of Tim Cook’s compensation package directly from the company and read what it says for yourself, then you can make up your own opinion about it. I don’t know if that’s actually possible or not but by “should” I mean I think that should be available.

If you’re not a shareholder, board member, or employee, then I don’t see what this transaction has to do with you and I don’t understand why you or any publication should feel the need to read or have a “take” on it.

> If you’re not a shareholder, board member, or employee, then I don’t see what this transaction has to do with you and I don’t understand why you or any publication should feel the need to read or have a “take” on it.

It is called entertainment. People like to talk about other people and some are jealous.

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