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Comment by sianemo | Hacker News Reader

He's perfectly capable of giving stock to these employees as well.

It's simple to say we'd be more charitable if we had incomes 1,000x or more our current annual compensation, but I do genuinely wonder if I'd be different. Would I be greedy, would I care about doing right to the laid off employees-- it's hard to imagine how crossing that bridge might change people.

I'm not going to try to justify how I would act, or how anyone else should act, were I to have a compensation package putting me easily in the top 0.1% of society, but we can collectively dispense with the notion that certain types of compensation (i.e. stocks) must necessarily be prohibitively harder for a CEO to give up than just money.

The CEO of Robinhood would need to file a public form with the SEC if he wanted to sell any of his shares. People watch that and say "hmmm, why is the CEO of Robinhood wanting to sell shares? I wonder what he knows that we don't" and the stock goes down on that information.

Stock is absolutely more difficult to liquidate for a CEO.

Is it charitable to accept responsibility for the consequences of your mistakes, and compensate those you've harmed? Or is it just common decency?

It's probably not that simple. Most chief executives delegate the responsibility of hiring staff to others. Sure, the buck stops with the executive, but ultimately nobody can review every single operational decision at scale. Maybe they hired for a world where the pandemic didn't happen and the monetary supply didn't tighten, then the world changed.

The entire purpose of the C-suite is to stay on top of macro level stuff, and its the boards purpose to make sure the C-suite is doing it. They didn't do their job. And they got rich not doing it.

I think it's high time to see if there aren't better ways to track the macro level stuff than hiring overlords. It seems to keep not working well.

"With great power comes great responsibility"

Nah, there's not really responsibility when your parachute is golden.

Well I agree that there isn’t in practice, but I wish that there was

What CEO doesn't approve overall hiring numbers? If you're worth paying millions upon millions of dollars a year, shouldn't you have capital-F Foresight?

Or is it more that most public-company CEOs are probably not playing above replacement level?

If the CEO is ultimately responsible for nothing, why are they paid so exorbitantly?

I think by example we can guess that you might act exactly that way (since so many other people do) but IMO the important thing is how do we as a society want people to act (ITT it would not be how this person is acting).

IMO we as a society should pass rules and laws to prevent people from acting this way ie limits on compensation.

Looking at Robinhood stock, it might be way less than that now. But I get your point

Robinhood is a public company. There's no difference between getting stock/RSU compared to getting paid in cash and then using it to buy stocks.

There is if you are an executive that is privy to non-public information.

That's insider trading, and a whole different accusation than the one levied above, which is implying some sort of wealth inequality issue that executives are compensated in stocks and non-executives are compensated in cash.

My point is that if you have non-public information, you can’t actually sell the shares for cash whenever you wish, so it’s not the same thing.

>you can’t actually sell the shares for cash whenever you wish, so it’s not the same thing.

I guess it's true that you can't sell "whenever you wish", but if you set up a rule 10b5-1 plan your shares are effectively as good as cash.

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