Amazon investors nuke ethics overhaul and say yes to $212M CEO pay
theregister.com
theregister.com
They used "multi-year" here over the actual timeline: 10 years. It sounds a lot less outrageous that his pay is heavily based on the stock price and comes out to be ~21 million a year as the head of one of the largest tech companies in the world.
Here are the details:
> Virtually all of Jassy’s 2021 comp — $211.9 million — was in restricted stock that vests over the next 10 years, according to Amazon’s proxy statement filed Friday. His base salary was $175,000, unchanged from the two prior years; in addition, Amazon paid $589,149 in security expenses for the CEO.
From Variety https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/amazon-andy-jassy-2021...
Edit:
> The Amazon board’s compensation committee said in the filing that it intends for Jassy’s stock award, which vests through 2031, “to serve as a long-term incentive for Mr. Jassy, and, accordingly, believes it should be viewed as compensation over the 10-year term and not solely as compensation for 2021.”
Doesn't sound like he'll get too many more RSUs yearly.
Does the CEO provide 700x the value (based on $21.2M / 2000 hrs = $10600 "hourly rate") of a warehouse worker earning $15/hr? They absolutely provide critical input and decisions at the helm of a large ship, but if you break down their input versus the input of everyone under them...is it actually such a huge disparity of mental and physical effort to warrant a 700x difference in pay?
Secondly, if the company wasn't spending that much on CEO compensation, the money could go plenty of places beyond sprinkling pennies at warehouse workers. Infrastructure investment, product development, or other ways to grow the business. Employee wellness programs, crisis/hardship assistance, etc to support the workforce.
Looking at it as only CEO salary divided by employee count is a very limiting perspective that ignores a lot of potential ways that pile of money can be used besides making a very rich person a bit richer.
A political leader is constrained by numerous laws. No, they do not deserve billions of dollars.
CEOs can be replaced by algorithms largely. And society will be all the better once they are. Their job literally is just decision making based on input and output of information.
This assertion is amusing given this ultra-powerful tech firm has been systematically wasting resources to ensure their employees are both worked to death and not paid even a living wage.
The point of that theme is primary to point out that the worker's wages aren't low because of the C-level pay. The worker's wages are low because almost anyone can do their job.
Damn near everyone in America, at least, has access to YouTube or other streaming services. I learned how to program in R from The Teaching Company Plus' (now Wondrium)'s "Learning Statistics: Concepts and Applications in R". 24 lectures. 12 hours of content. Resources available for download. It was the springboard that allowed me to seek out deeper resources and expand my knowledge. Total price, $10.81 for a one month subscription.
You can probably find a lot of equally good free courses at other websites.
My point being this. The information is out there for people willing to seek it out. I came up poor. Really poor. Like, we're having mayonnaise sandwiches tonight for dinner poor. And if you're wondering what's in a mayonnaise sandwich, it's in the name. Mayonnaise. Bread. Period.
Now maybe we need to cultivate a sense of curiosity in our students, so even the ones who end up as warehouse workers at an Amazon can one day aspire to something greater, but at some point, people have to take some responsibility for how their own lives are turning out.
It's really easy to point the finger to society, to the government, to the person next door to you, but at the end of the day, most people have the tools (smartphones, cheap laptops), and they absolutely have the time. But the drive is something that no government program or no private initiative can give them - that you have to pull out of your gut yourself. And if you can't do that, you're doomed to a life of mediocrity.
Choose your hard.
Enough with this pseudo-moralistic perpetuation of abuse, specially the tone-deaf ones based on survivorship bias.
Just because someone is not able to win the lottery that does not mean they have no right to earn a living wage that allows them a honest living.
Aren't we supposed to live in a civilized society? Why are you unwittingly normalizing exploitation and the widespread abuse that bars the majority of families from having a decent life? If not for the parents who can't be self-taught engineers, why not for their children? Are those also expected to endure hardship?
Just pay people a fair wage. Is it that hard?
Yes. Because we have no idea how to define 'fair'. I hear 'fair wage' over and over but no one can ever explain to me what makes the wage 'fair' other than, "I have a job and I should be able to live on that single job!"
Okay... why? Where is it written that you should be able to live on a single job?
As soon as you can come up with an argument that's not emotive, and is instead quantitative, I'll listen.
Right now, all I hear from people parroting this is that, "It's not right!"
> As soon as you can come up with an argument that's not emotive, and is instead quantitative, I'll listen.
I have a feeling that you will not accept any argument based on general morality as you would describe it as 'emotive'.
I think first that humans should not spend the majority of their lives working and sleeping. In other words: surviving. Especially when there are more than enough resources available to achieve this ( in your country).
Second, exploiting other humans (as above) is absolutely wrong.
These two arguments are not emotionally driven.
Well, we do. I mean, we have a pretty solid idea of what represents the absolute bare minimum. For starters, minimum wage should be a living wage. It should be enough all on its own to meet living expenses, including paying for a modest apartment, without breaking any effort rate limit.
Is this too hard?
Are we supposed to pretend that some people simply do not have a right to have a decent life?
> . I hear 'fair wage' over and over but no one can ever explain to me what makes the wage 'fair' other than, "I have a job and I should be able to live on that single job!"
Why exactly do you have a hard time understanding this?
Look at yourself. Look at the living expenses you have, specially the basic necessities. You pay for the roof over your head, for the food on your plate, for the clothes on your back. Do you have a hard time quantifying that?
This is even simpler than that. Landlords and banks already use the concept of effort rate. They already know that if someone's effort rate goes beyond 40% then they are at a significant risk of financial distress. Is it too hard to start from there and determine what's a living wage in any region?
Or is there zero lack of interest, and a desire to pull the ladder out of your own feet to screw everyone less fortunate than you?
Who do you think keeps society and your life functioning while you sit in front of a computer and code?
I served with an Electronics Technician in the Navy who started watching YouTube videos on commercial HVAC and now he does that as a living, servicing mostly restaurants in the Fort Worth-Dallas Metroplex, and not just making a "living", but last year his one-man operation made $300,000.
Not too shabby for just watching YouTube and going to get the necessary certifications.
Do you want to make the best pizza on the planet? There are YouTube videos out there from chefs all over the world, freely giving away their recipes. All you gotta do is pick up the ingredients and get started.
If someone wants it bad enough, they'll go get it, they won't wait for it to be handed to them.
Not everyone wants to be a software developer or something that makes a lot of money and it's a damn bleak view of the world where the grand diversity of the human race is squashed into a profit-chasing monoculture of workers. Just throw away your dreams and install air conditioning. It's the will of the market.
We've gone from the Renaissance ideals of being well rounded and interesting people to being the best single purpose cog in the machine, devoid of any values except making money. What a depressing attitude when we could just focus on treating people fairly and with respect whatever their choices.
Let’s use some data, for example wealth distribution (1) - the lower classes have stayed lower income, and the middle class is rapidly transferring wealth to the upper classes. How is this sustainable?
(1) https://www.pewresearch.org/social-trends/2020/01/09/trends-...
So when people spend so much mental energy complaining about how things aren't "fair", okay, sure, but you could instead just improve your situation. There will always be poor people, but an individual will not always be poor. We are not yet anywhere close to a situation where the highest expected value of an individual's time is to complain (instigating revolt).
This discussion is about minimum wage, wealth gaps, and relative compensation of CEOs. You do realise that? If you think everything is perfect, feel free to ignore such threads. The status quo exists and doesn’t need your support.
Saying that working class people can just work harder and get higher paying jobs, doesn’t solve anyone’s problem. In fact, it only furthers the problem that only some jobs get a living wage, and even fewer jobs get a good wage.
I have no idea why you think it’s okay to tell poor people to “just improve their situation”, and contribute both their/our tax money towards enriching the wealthy.
I was poor. I improved my situation. I didn't spend much time complaining about rich people on the internet, because that would have detracted from the time I taught myself marketable skills for 8 hours a day, every day, for 7 months, while delivering pizzas and living in a shithole with 3 other people. You're right though, complaining would have been much easier, but somehow I don't think I'd still be making a quarter mil if I had taken that route.
"Pathetic" to recommend people work hard and fix their life? That sentiment itself is what's pathetic. The world doesn't owe you shit.
Anyways, your repeated “I got mine, fuck you” mentality is very boring and toxic - https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/michaeltomasky/201....
Good luck, happy that you solved poverty! I’ll stop engaging as this thread will lead nowhere.
Quite frankly, this is as sensible of a comp package for a CEO as one could propose. Compensated in primarily in equity with a long horizon for vesting. If a company wanted its executive to be aligned with the interests of its shareholders, is there really a better structure?
Aligning the incentives of the CEO to the incentives of shareholders by awarding the equivalent of an 0.012% ownership stake seems reasonable to me.
Say an exec makes Jassy’s base and has a large equity packages. Do banks feel comfortable writing loans against to-be-vested RSUs? I’d imagine they count RSU vesting as heavily discounted future cash flow.. but not sure.
Plus there is significant volatility in the actual value they bank at the end of the day- sure, speaking on normal terms having an equity package fluctuate at this scale isn’t significant to an individual’s finances, but might be to a bank underwriting, say, a recent Snap exec’s loans…
Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! How out of touch with reality are you, if you think that's acceptable for any human to make that kind of money when majority of the world can hardly afford food.
Mind you, I agree with you on the general point, but turns out people don't act terribly rationally about who they get angry at for making too much money.
One gets to where they are with extreme practice, talent, dedication, and typically a generous portion of privilege while growing up.
The other (tech execs) often get where they are by lying, cheating, manipulating, and with nepotism.
The decision to make AWS created 100s of billions of dollars of value. CEO decisions can make and break companies.
> If there were no employees other than the CEO then the $500M doesn't get made.
Right, and if Tom Brady doesn't have receivers to throw to he doesn't win any super bowls. It is the leadership that can create massive amounts of value.
I can make decisions to create something all day, none of it makes any money unless effort is put into it's creation. Product and engineering and design made AWS which allowed the company to make billions. The marketing team after that.
No decision is worth this much money when it comes at the expense of paying the people for their labour.
His decision-making can absolutely influence the bottom line far more than any single Amazon warehouse worker could.
Now, I'm not saying that warehouse workers are worthless or should be treated like shit, far from it, but if Amazon doesn't pay him this much, some other corporation will. That's the free market.
Regardless of if he's a magician or not, we're talking about work.
> His decision-making can absolutely influence the bottom line far more than any single Amazon warehouse worker could.
I decided to have coffee this morning, but if I don't put in a doordash order and there's no barista, then I don't get to have coffee.
Pay is a function of scarcity and value they bring.
> How out of touch with reality are you, if you think that's acceptable for any human to make that kind of money when majority of the world can hardly afford food.
Livable conditions for all humans have nothing to do with how to compensate top of the of the top people in their profession. By mixing those 2, you're only hurting your case.
Small nit pick, but it's a function of perceived economic value, which I think is where some of the outrage comes from.
For example, someone may provide a lot of unperceived economic value and not be paid accordingly or they may provide a high level of societal value, but relatively low economic value and not be paid well.
I seriously doubt those skills which are supposed to define scarcity at this point. There is too much management to require a seriously special person on that chair. I'm sure you could have someone from mid-management on that chair and it still wouldn't run worse. It would probably even run better.
So what is the value there? It's almost like with a piece of art. Only because people are ready to pay a price for it, it's valued at that price.
On the other hand you have thousands of slaves working for the same company, generating value you can actually touch and they earn unbelievably less that the artistic head of this monster.
So sure...nice try but you have to be really far away from the bottom to actually believe it.
Did you ever try to manage small org vs big org vs huge company? It's very naive to think that managing dozens of people requires same skills as managing some of the biggest companies in the world.
I'm Bill Gates.
Did you?
I worked for small and huge companies though and I could see that it requires far less work to manage a huge one than to manage a small one. I wouldn't even call it "work" if managing the small one is work. It's more like pointing your finger.
I assume you never actually lead anyy bigger team for significant amount of time. I’m not a manager, but I’ve lead teams of around 50 people as an IC. It’s tough job that requires very specific skill set to be successful.
As I wrote above: some mid-management person would probably be much better suited for the position. They are theoretically still in the pool but not realistically so the "scarcity" theory is faked since it's a fake group of people who are being considered. They're most of the times not even considered for their skill set. They've been just sucking up to their predecessor while stabbing everybody else in their way in the back. How this is considered a valuable skill for managing any company (besides in the mafia probably) is beyond me. Maybe you could explain it to me.
On the other hand, you can't replace a brain surgeon with a night nurse. You can't even take a random doctor to do the job and the brain surgeons reputation is directly connected to the actual work he/she does with their own hands. When he gets older, his eyes weaker, his hands shaky, he won't be able to do the job anymore.
As to if you think the folks who pay them are clueless to do so, do you know any of them personally?
So the people who are paying, are (indirectly) paying out of their own pockets.
If someone can't pay out of their own pockets the amount they think someone is worth for them to work for them (or appoint someone to do it for them), then... what's the alternative?
And they surely not pay it out of THEIR OWN pockets...they pay it out of pockets of their customers and so on goes the responsibility train...
Also what's the "choice" there? Seriously, even calling that "choice" is ridiculous.
The alternative is to force those bloodsuckers to pay wages people can life from. They can keep the rest. Nobody would give a damn because at some point they'd have to rise prices to reflect even in the slightest ways the actual worth of the work of their weakest slaves which carry the whole construct. Maybe and only maybe then they'd cut the wages higher above where all those useless paper pushers sit with their fancy names or they'd lose money because people would stop buying their shit.
Quite easy eh? And everybody knows about that solution. It's just not happening because everybody who could enforce it, is just as greedy as the assholes on top and their "shareholders".
They can pay those wages because workers who can do the work to a level they consider acceptable will accept them.
One way to solve this problem is to convince those workers to work together as a bloc, not accept those wages, and demand higher ones.
Some folks won't like that of course, but the willingness to tell them to fuck off is important. If someone can't say no to a bad deal, after all, they can't actually negotiate.
I don't have a horse in that race however, and have more than enough of my own stuff I need to focus on.
Sure it does. I'm a human being with a healthy moral compass. Why doesn't it impact you?
> They can pay those wages because workers who can do the work to a level they consider acceptable will accept them.
Wow...do you think people would do it if they had a choice or a saying in this matter? Seriously?
> One way to solve this problem is to convince those workers to work together as a bloc, not accept those wages, and demand higher ones.
But they are not a bloc and the rest of society has done a great job to divide them along artificial lines (race, politics, gender, religion, etc.) and the same basic construct the ones above adhere to: selfishness as the winning factor within the system. The system does also everything it can to hinder unions of any kind. You could see how much of a WONDER it was when some people managed to form one at Amazon. It's been on the news worldwide!
So you making it something they could "just do" is kinda disgusting.
Because money is artificially kept scarce.
Do you think Amazon could maintain its warehouses if it didn't have desperate workers trying to make enough to survive? Shit no it couldn't. So why do think the boss of that company who well let's be honest could probably be replaced quite easily compared to the warehouse workers (it's easy af to replace a workforce of one man but go try fill 10'000 positions at once) should get paid so much more than the workers literally making his company work? It'd take the AVG worker 3.5 lifetimes on 20 an hour to be compensated the same as one year of that CEO. Are you telling me that is acceptable? Your going to create individuals who have wealth that would take the AVG Joe 35 lifetimes to equal. Lol folks who simp for absurd pays to CEOs are legit bonkers. Your never going to earn that. Your kids and your kids kids are never going to earn that not for another 35 generations. So yeah how fair so you think that is? How equal is that? Creating a class of generational slaves and wealth imbalance that's set to last a few thousand years. Such sustainable business! Lol
No, athletes are paid what they deserve. That wasn't always the case, they got it through collective bargaining and it took strikes to make it happen.
The average warehouse worker does not have this option, and the entire government/media/corporate apparatus is designed to make collective bargaining as difficult as possible. The difference between a warehouse worker and an NFL player warming the bench is that one has a union, with teeth, that has fought for his fair share.
No, the difference is that NFL makes a ton of money per player and they only want the best so the supply is extremely limited whereas basically anyone can work in a warehouse so there supply is basically infinite.
If warehouses paid NFL wages, nobody would spend like 10 years practicing for the minuscule chance they get into the NFL and make NFL wages.
No, it's not. The NFL athlete market is even more ripe for collusion than other markets because there are only a handful of owners who can (and did) easily collude to keep salaries low. It took several player strikes to get the NFL to the eye popping numbers we see today, and it wasn't always that way. There is no way in hell Tom Brady get's to command a $50MM salary if the next guy on the bench is only making $80k/yr. Owners wont commit to a 500k/yr minimum for a guy who is injured out of the goodness of their hearts. You can't ignore that the jumps in player compensation happened in the NFL after lockouts and strikes. The "invisible hand of the market" isn't a force you can take for granted.
Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations"
What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?
Basically, corporate politics as usual - they call the shots, everyone else tows the line, they dress up the results as a win.
It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job. Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people, and it is almost impossible for the people to countervail the control authority of the extremely small set of owners who own the majority of voting shares.
Let the justice system crack down on people or organizations "violating human rights" and give companies like Amazon orders to cease service if necessary. Or pass laws to require them to filter some extremely specific use cases, such as the dissemination of child pornography.
Mega corporations shouldn't be the ones deciding what is and is not a socially acceptable activity.
IMO it's even worse than that. Not only do we expect corporations to do the government's job, we're also giving corporations more power than we give governments.
Just look at the "it's a private company they can censor whoever they want!" crowd. They actually believe companies who control over half the content we're exposed to online should be able to censor and deplatform whoever they want for whatever reason they want.
I visit Canadian subreddits and they cheer when our telecom oligopoly censors RT news and unironically ask to "do fox news now!"
The part where they're given more power than we give the government.
Last I checked, political beliefs are not a protected class.
IMO they can't be trusted with having more power than the government. They have way too much control over what people consume on the internet.
The last thing I want is to give the government more power.
no shit, private companies have the power to set the compensation to whatever the fuck they want. end of story
It makes me wonder how much overlap there is between the "private companies can censor who they want" crowd and the "CEO salaries should be capped" crowd.
But that doesn't mean we can't have the social conversation over whether that's a reality we want to perpetuate. A tiny number of private companies have de facto control over what information the masses get exposed to, and to a lot of people, myself included, that just seems like an incredibly unhealthy state of affairs in the project towards an ever more vibrant civilization. We have the right to talk about it and decide to try to change the law.
There is an entire internet where you can get any type of information that suits your world view.
I don't want megacorps to take on the role of a government or law enforcement, but I do think there should be societal obligations and expectations towards corporations to use their property and power in a positive way for society. Current law is the overall minimum boundry, not the goal.
My current thought is, that this is mostly a matter of expectations, not actual change from the current state of things. If actors get away from our expectations, they should not be punished as if they broke a law, but it should prompt us to prepare one so it aligns with our expectations.
Maybe it is more a 'please don't force us to legislate every little thing' wishful thinking stance?
They are already doing the government's job by hosting their servers.
But why the fuck not? They hold an insane amount of power over people, directly and indirectly. The way for the people to have some power back over them is through unions. The fact that our entire system is set up to block collective bargaining is a huge artificial asymmetry.
This isn't something Amazon isn't aware of, I went to the AWS Summit in NYC a few years ago and every few minutes the Keynote got interrupted by another protester yelling "Cut ties with ICE" and getting dragged out of the room. I don't think I was the only one quickly googling on their phones to figure out what they were talking about. I couldn't move my previous company off of AWS, but I moved all my personal servers and I steered my new company away from them.
Could you provide any sources for this? As it stands, I've seen zero tangible results regarding Amazon's ongoing unchecked growth, the prevailing lack of workplace standards in their warehouses or for delivery drivers, monopolistic practices, or any general "ethical" standing of the company.
Same goes for the US Government. Sure, you can vote for who you want and try to elect change, call your congress reps, and protest at the chambers, but it doesn't matter when they nothing gets done at the top level. Until there is an honest discussion had about immigration reform without a partisan spin put on everything, we won't get anywhere with ICE.
Is amazon unique in this because if not, it just feels pointless to complain about it as there is enough competition that if they don't do it, some competitor will and thus the only way you can fix it is through industry wide regulation.
I seriously doubt people think this.
[0]https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-fix/wp/2014/05/06/ju...
[1]https://www.nytimes.com/2016/07/06/us/politics/hillary-clint...
[2]https://www.politico.com/news/2021/11/13/raid-veritas-okeefe...
[3]https://nypost.com/2022/03/18/intelligence-experts-refuse-to...
"Undocumented" is mostly just a euphemism for illegal. Amazon does a significant amount of shady things, selling servers to ICE isn't one of them. Open borders are neither feasible nor popular.
Hence 'Illegal Immigrant'.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
How about we start with rape, torture, and murder, and work our way back.
But like really. How do we figure anything out? We work at it, we learn we make mistakes and we grow. It seems like just throwing you're hands up is oppositional to the entire notions of innovation that guide tech companies in the first place.
It's hard but we pay CEO's $21 million dollars a year to do hard things.
*21m/yr, if you read the details.
There are plenty of organisations trying to do just that. UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, etc. There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.
How about confiscating someone's fruit cart because they do not possess a licence for it? This led to Mohamed Bouazizi immolating himself, which triggered the Arab Spring.
How about fining someone for refusing to use someone else's gender pronouns? Or for refusing to perform a Brazilian wax on the male genitalia of a male who asserts they are a woman?
If not, then I question the existence of any underlying principle, beyond ideology, guiding their assessments.
>>There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.
The UDHR, as interpreted by the UNHR High Commission, explicitly defines "collective bargaining rights" as a human right:
https://www.ohchr.org/en/instruments-mechanisms/instruments/...
Laws that grant collective bargaining rights mandate an employer to engage in collective bargaining with any set of his workers that form a union and demand collective bargaining, to the exclusion of negotiating with any other worker or job applicant. Such a government mandate is a blatant violation of the right to free association, and thus property understood as a violation of human rights. In fact, it violates article 20 of the UDHR, which states:
https://www.un.org/en/about-us/universal-declaration-of-huma...
>>Everyone has the right to freedom of peaceful assembly and association.
Has Ki-Moon ever explicitly told any other UN branch to cut it with its rhetoric and unabashed partisan bloc voting?
"Quite easily" is a stretch, that document is a well-intentioned mess. It omits rights that many take for granted, and the interpretation of many of them is highly subjective.
For instance, Article 10 gives everybody the right to a fair and public hearing by an independent and impartial tribunal. But it doesn't recognize the right to a trial by a jury of your peers.
Article 12 forbids attacks on somebody's honor or character. Does this mean calling a politician a lying scumbag is a violation of that politicians human rights? And how does this square with Article 19, which states that everybody has a right to freedom of expression?
Article 16 states that men and women have a right to get married, but the phrasing could be interpreted to only protect heterosexual marriages. (Probably provided by Article 2, but that could be debated.)
Article 25 states that mothers and children are entitled to special care and assistance, but says nothing of fathers. This seems to violate Article 2.
Article 26 says that elementary education shall be compulsory, but also states that parents have the right to decide what kind of education their children receive. Does that mean that Germany banning homeschooling is a violation of the rights of parents? Or maybe homeschooling itself a violation of a child's right to compulsory education? Can a parent choose to send their child to the "school of hard-knocks working in a coal mine"? What if instead of a coal mine, it's an illiterate tribal lifestyle with a high child mortality rate? Is a government compelled or forbidden to force native children into schools, as Canada and other countries infamously did in the past?
Article 27 seems to suggest that copyright and patent protections are a human right, but doesn't establish any limitations to this right. Are patents expiring after ~20 years a violation of the human rights of inventors?
Article 29 gives an escape clause allowing a democratic government to limit any of these rights whenever doing so is in the interest of morality, public order, or general welfare of the democratic society. What the hell does any of that mean in practice?
Article 30 can be interpreted to contradict Article 19, forbidding people from criticizing the Universal Declaration of Human Rights if they do so with the intent of destroying any these supposed human rights. Does that mean protesting against copyright is a violation of human rights?
And this thread turned into mostly envious ranting pretty fast. A lot of folks aren't even trying to have actual discussions, just mindless ranting past one another, behaving like crabs in a bucket, etc...
It even makes me doubt if it's all organic or if their are paid trolls from competitors as well in the mix.
Considering that Amazon, and Jeff Bezos, are not known to give out lavish comp. packages willy-nilly, it seems like more could be learned investigating why this guy is worth $21 million a year.
1) Has the Amazon board ever recommended voting yes on any shareholder proposals?
2) Have any Amazon shareholder proposals ever been approved by investors?
*250K total comp
Shareholders invest in Amazon for growth and (now) for profit. Compensating the CEO based on how effectively they deliver that seems like a pretty dang obvious strategy for shareholders to support.
I'm pretty sure I don't like this new definition; it feels like it's based on greed, not value.
I do not see historical support for your claim that the purpose of a company was "to employ people and provide services and value to the community they existed in" even if that would be an ideal social outcome (and one which I'd personally prefer to see everywhere).
[1] https://news.law.fordham.edu/jcfl/2018/11/18/a-brief-history...
The social function is downstream from this, and it's also what creates friction to actually /change the law/ to withdraw those privileges -- you do it at the risk of hemorrhaging that tax base which funds the governing apparatus.
The purpose of a corporation is to conduct a lawful, ethical, profitable and sustainable business in order to create value over the long-term, which requires consideration of the stakeholders that are critical to its success (shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, creditors and communities) ...
https://www.aspeninstitute.org/programs/business-and-society...
Business corporations are perhaps the most influential organizations in society and have long been recognized as important contributors to the common good. Society grants corporations unique privileges in order to harness their great capacities to serve its needs.
https://www.ft.com/content/482a8435-c04c-4be8-9856-941e7ecf1...
... it would abandon shareholder primacy and redefine corporate purpose to create an economy that “serves all Americans”.
https://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/the-role-of-the-corporation-in-so... :
... scholars Berle and Means (1932) predicted ... both owners and "the control" accepting public interest as the objective of the corporation.
For what it's worth, I don't know if any of those sources cover broad economic trends across history. I do find them in pursuit of noble goals for the early 2020s.
But in this case, my opinion is that there's a bit of a gulf there in between "this is how I would like things to work" and "this is how things have worked today/in the past/for a long time".
This describes charities, trusts and local governments. Maybe artisans. The East India companies weren’t trying to “provide services and value” to anyone but their owners. Even going back to Roman times, civic duty and commercial interests were distinct parts of peoples’ work. You were expected to do both. But the unification of the two pursuits appears to be more modern.
"The purpose of a corporation is to ... create value over the long-term, which requires consideration of the stakeholders ... (shareholders, employees, customers, suppliers, creditors and communities) ..."
https://corpgov.law.harvard.edu/2020/05/27/on-the-purpose-of...
Sure. (Though this is far from settled.) But saying this was the "original...purpose of a company" is inaccurate.
'Look at all these employees I resent having to spend money on and actively try to make redundant and underpay. Aren't I just great?'
Can't we build a society where "sane" employment is a valid and wanted output and not only maximising shareholder value?
Practically, we haven't yet developed anti-fragile socio-ideological technologies which can out compete shareholder-maximization ideologies(SMIs). Instead SMIs are adept at castrating anti-SMIs and rendering them inert before they can establish a foothold. The world we enter into today is the product of this anti-SMI castration. You can even see echos of the great SMI war play out whenever SMI granades are casually lobbed in the bushwar of this discussion.
I bet a lot of companies already have more non-employee shareholders than they have employees.
It doesn't seem to be a problem.
EDIT: If someone has a more recent, or somehow better, graph than this one [1], then I'm all ears.
[1] : https://slate.com/business/2014/07/ceo-pay-for-performance-t...
Why on earth should one accept a percent-based framing of these ludicrous numbers?
Is it 0.47%?
If you're going to mock me over math, then at least don't be off by a factor of a hundred. :)
And compared to most in the article, Jassy's comp is very shareholder friendly. He's paid 99% in RSUs - his income already dropped about a third from when the comp was agreed.