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Comment by pookeh | Hacker News Reader

I always wondered if high profile CEOs and shareholders know something substantial of the upcoming future that us leaf nodes are just clueless about. Is it just copy cat or deep info for privileged clubs?

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After having an opportunity to talk 1:1 with two of the most revered personalities/founders/ceos in tech, I’ve come to the conclusion that they are as much full of s** as the rest of us. Probably even more.

I know the sample size of 2 is not scientific, but it was enough for me to not have any illusions about the nature of things.

Are they really going to tell you the "privileged" stuff 1:1 if they don't know you well, or the stupid stuff that they tell the public?

At that level, trusting people you don't know is even more risky.

You don’t need “privileged” stuff to get an idea about how the other person thinks about things. Also, I am not talking about some “met at a conference” or “did an interview” kind of a setting, this professional work environments kind of a setting.

CEO tenure has been dropping for years. So what they know is that if they want to get paid in a big way, they need to quickly do things that look tough and improve short-term cash flow, which in turn bump the stock price.

If they wanted to actually be tough, they could ride it out and take slowdowns as a time to really improve internally. As an example, take Toyota, which rose from the decimation of post-war Japan to the world's largest car company by sticking to a no-layoffs policy and using slack times to invest in people, process, and plant.

> Everybody else is doing it, why aren’t we?

Pretty much just that. This is how big companies decide most things, not only layoffs.

CEOs are just managers, not philosophers. People thinking they're all knowing demigods is just marketing to try and justify those extremely high salaries. They're no different than your average person.

I still regret not liquidating at the end of 2021 while all CEOs were selling their positions by the 10s of millions.

Were they abnormally liquidating those things at the end of 2021 compared to other years?

Asking because I would expect executives to sell "by the 10s of millions" pretty much every year. Especially since they cannot really sell on a whim (in the US), as executives are legally required to file their stock purchase/sell plans with SEC far ahead of time.

10b5-1 plans do not have to be filed with the SEC.

(The use of a 10b5-1 is also not technically a legal requirement, but is a workaround to allow planned sales even if you become aware of material, non-public information between the time of entering into the plan and the time of the trade.)

You can prove the boss had an intention to sell his stock based on a feeling of future doom (or just greed). What’s tougher to prove is whether he delayed an announcement by a week so one more sale went through before the stock took a hit.

Or speeding up good news so his scheduled sale rides the high.

the best thing about them is you can constantly schedule large stock sales, and just cancel the ones that don't favour you.

Look ma, no inside information.

No, I don't believe that they greatly improved their crystal ball performance since July, when the now-infamous pay packages were still being doled out. Amazon started to tighten the belt a little earlier when it realized that it had too much FC capacity, but it was still rushing to add capacity as recently as July 2021.[1]

[1]: https://www.supplychaindive.com/news/amazon-earnings-logisti...

I don’t think it’s deep info, or even copycat, except of course that general industry tends to be driven by the same economic waves that roll over us from time to time. When executives expect recession conditions, they try to act proactively. One of the certain places they can quickly cut costs is in headcount.

Tech definitely bloated a bit over the pandemic because of the uncertainty. Pandemic is over, recession is upon us, this is more a normalization in my opinion.

They know what we all already had been knowing, nothing new. But were slow to react.

Everyone had been believing that there will be a huge surge in economic activity post-covid, aka starting from 2022. Therefore over hired in the pandemic to catch the market.

We know that didn't happen. Rather Ukraine war has dampened it further. Now they are hurrying to correct it. They were dragging feet initially, but Musk's successful Twitter layoff triggered another avalanche.

It what way was Elon's layoff successful? They'll probably be bankrupt in less than a year.

> I always wondered if high profile CEOs and shareholders know something substantial of the upcoming future that us leaf nodes are just clueless about.

If they knew the future, then why did they overhire in the first place?

Why does it need privileged information. Interest rates are up. The information is public.

The plebes want more share of the pie, the fed and elites want more unemployment. Is this a consequence of raising rates, or is it in pursuit of more unemployment?

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