Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday | Hacker News Reader

Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

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290 pointsilamont375 comments

I'm always intrigued at people's carriers and where exactly the inflection point was. Looking at Surojit's career, it went something like this:

BS in CS at Kharagput, something like a US T2 university

MS in CS at Buffalo, something like a T2 univeristy,

Spend some years at IBM and Oracle as a developer/senior developer 200k/year ?

MIT Sloan MBA T1 world class

PM/Senior PM at Symantec for a year 200-300k/year?

Head of Payment products India at Google, 8 years rising though the ranks 300-500k/year?, did an externship of 2 years at flipkart as SVP

Then back to google as a VP 500-1.5MM/year?

CPO at coinbase made 150 million.

It looks like he moved around, leveraging his title to get senior roles between start-up and well-established companies:

PM at small company to PM at big company,

Head of product at big company to SVP at startup

SVP at startup to VP at big company

VP of big company to C-suite at startup pre-IPO

Most of all, he got in on the crypto gravy train right in time for his options to balloon

I'm pretty much convinced that the inflection point is "Director" at a FAANG or "VP" at a smaller company. Once you get to that point, it's pretty much impossible to fail downward. Worker bees rise up in level when they succeed (or the economy is good) and fall down in level when they fail (or the economy is bad). But, I've never heard of a Director or VP or anyone from the "executive class" getting a downgrade when moving jobs, regardless of performance and regardless of the economic environment. Once you pass that singularity, it's up, up, and away.

It's more about having the "fuck you" money. Once you reach this level, you typically have about $3-5M in various assets, so you don't have to work in order to keep paying your bills. You may want to work to buy that next supercar or yacht, but you don't have to.

So, if you are out of luck, you postpone that $5M waterfront summer home purchase, go sit on some board for symbolic money, sniff around, and eventually join some hot startup when you and your buddies found another investor cow to milk.

Not having to commit your time to a shitty offer in order to pay your bills right now makes a killing.

Importantly, having fuck you money means you can take outsized risk when you leap. To your point, your tolerance for worker bee work means you're not getting out of bed except for possible home runs. You're not going anywhere you're turning over Jira tickets, you're looking for the next score.

For context if you live in Palo Alto it just buys you a house.

I saw an acre plot on the market recently for $5.2 in Atherton - no house.

There are many people who reach the director level and then transition careers outside of tech, because they can no longer get hired at that level.

This is especially common during a downturn, when there's less money to go around for people who are "inspiring", but can't "roll up their sleeves" or earn the respect of those who do.

Depending on how long you've been in the industry, it might be because your sample size falls within the anomalous period of 2001-2022. Expect to see a bunch of ex-tech directors opening bakeries, breweries, consulting/"life-coaching" practices, etc.

I don't think I'd call it falling downwards, more like surfing tangentially. It's still a pretty comfortable and fulfilling life, but I wouldn't describe it as up, up & away.

[edit] this is pretty hard to disambiguate from the "fuck you money" types described by a sibling commenter, superficially, but there is a wide distribution of net worths in this group.

Yeah, I agree this is more accurate.

There's going to be a whole lot of people who peak with some fancy-sounding title at a no-name company. Then they fade into a vaguely-comfortable (but definitely not rich) obscurity where they can't fully retire — but they sort of drift along with occasional consulting gigs, or writing a niche Substack, or getting really into baking sourdough bread, or some other such nihilistic affectations.

In the grand scheme of things, it still beats having to get a real job.

I think another part of it is that there are many "bootlickers" that will do whatever it takes to keep that director floating, because they think or feel that director will get them promoted, give them a bonus, etc. The moment that director walks in, they are prepared.

I think this is mainly because such people are very career focused (and politically savvy to get to that point) and careful not to take a role that could even signal a step back. That and they typically will have enough financial security that they don't need to rush anything. "Lower level" folks are less likely to have both of these be true.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Andrew_Fastow

Andrew Fastow, former CFO of Enron, became a document review clerk after serving his jail sentence. But five years later he became something called a "Principal" for an analytics company called KeenCorp.

Part of it is they just won’t take jobs that are a downgrade. As a result it can take a long time to find a new role in some cases.

Jumping between big companies and small companies isn't a bad career strategy.

Small companies like the brand names, but you can take big steps up in title in the small companies and startups.

I did it myself, though it was accident of history rather than being planned.

Your salary estimates are high in my opinion. He would have been H1B after his Masters.

>Spend some years at IBM and Oracle as a developer/senior developer 200k/year

65-100k maybe less.

>PM/Senior PM at Symantec for a year 200-300k/year?

150k max.

Oracle, IBM and Symantec do not pay as well as FAANG and you need to adjust for the time. They also colluded to suppress wages.

But he did navigate the valley. Seems like a cool guy to get to know and I'd read his autobiography.

I've worked with Surojit; he was an absolute superstar. He rose through the ranks on the basis of mountains of backbreaking and incredibly impactful work.

> on the basis of mountains of backbreaking and incredibly impactful work

I can spot (maybe unintentional) ambiguity from a mile away. Whose backs were broken, and who did the work.

Can you spot a metaphor?

>basis of mountains of backbreaking and incredibly impactful work.

This is the kind of BS MBAs say to each other.

He also had a terrible reputation of being an arrogant prick. People hated working for him (or so I've been told). I've heard he made grown people cry.

None of that is true, so far as I know. I remember him as kind and considerate. That doesn't mean he wasn't demanding, but he was quite fair, and sensitive to the impact of his words and actions.

Apparently he did the equivalent work of 500 engineers. Impressive!

Like what?

He was sr director when he left google first time, so more like 800k+ He was probably making > 1.5M in his second stint at google.

His big break was heading up mobile search ad revenue task force at the time mobile traffic was growing like crazy. Big oppty and he was up to the task. It's hard to say he really succeeded at flipkart, google shopping, and coinbase. Each of those were 2 year or less stints.

It encourages me to think that I may still yet have an inflection point.

Good question. My gut says his all in comp for Google including stock would likely be a lot higher but who knows.

Since when IIT Kharagpur is Tier 2?

I had the same reaction, but I think OP is talking in terms of world stage. That's closer to true than not.

As an american with a likely ignorant but common view, IIT bombay is the only Tier 1 IIT

Tier 3?

This is the right question to ask

In looking for a pattern in the data are we just being fooled by randomness?

The title of the article is a bit misleading. It implies that he's leaving with a severance package -- that he was let go by the company -- but the $105M is from selling stock from his original employment package and it seems like he's leaving on his own volition.

It's not that misleading. This isn't an early employee who held onto his shares. He joined less than two years ago. He got an insanely high compensation package.

On the bright side, Coinbase launched a lot of high-value new products during the last two years that will help the company thrive and grow in the coming years.

Indistinguishable from parody...

What would be an example of a new product that will help the company thrive?

It's indistinguishable because he is in fact making a joke.

Coinswitch, a crypto-exchange in India is now pivoting to wealth management:

> We have seven new non-crypto products in our 2023 roster, which includes fixed deposits, ETFs [exchange-traded funds], mutual funds, stocks, bonds and U.S. equities.

> The goal is to be the one-stop wealth-tech destination for every Indian. As we diversify into other asset classes, there are different business models we are experimenting with to check which is the best for customers. There are multiple partnerships in place since we are launching such large-scale assets onto our platform. [Editor’s note: CoinSwitch declined to give the names of partners or detail on licenses obtained to sell non-crypto products.]

> We started off with a mission to make money equal for all. Crypto was the starting point for us but we will continue to innovate towards being a wealth tech platform. We see crypto as an investment class that is offered alongside other assets, to help users build a diversified portfolio.

Ref: https://forkast.news/indias-coinswitch-exchange-looks-to-non...

honestly Coinbase being such a laggard might have been the reason they survived.

Imagine if they'd followed FTX and doubled down on perps and options.

Examples please.

Coinbase Pets: A custody management solution for storing and transferring pet ownership certificates on the blockchain.

Coinbase Recipies: Cooking recipes stores and exchanged on the blockchain.

Coinbase Ponzi: Turnkey service to create, launch and list your new tokens. Whitepaper generated through partnership with ChatGPT. A16Z investment guaranteed.

Jesus people on HN must all the be on the spectrum. Everyone's joke detectors are broken

He got a pretty typical comp package but he happened to get in right before COIN stock took off, which made it astronomical.

It's like the folks who joined Amazon a few years ago as Staff engineers. Their original comp packages were valued at $200k-$300k per year, but then the stock took off, and they ended up with $1M+ per year. They started with a typical package that was stock heavy and got lucky.

Interestingly the people getting in now are getting screwed for the same reason -- with the stock dropping, their comp package is getting cut in half.

I don’t think it makes sense to compare options with RSUs. The former is worthless in a company that doesn’t grow and it’s necessary to stay with the company until IPO. It’s a huge risk. The latter is closer to cash, bubbles notwithstanding.

The people getting in now aren’t screwed, they can just ask for refreshers. But the previous batch certainly got an unexpected windfall.

It turned out to be an insanely high compensation package because of the volatility of crypto

factoring in that volatility the expected value was probably pretty low

For a sense of scale; a somewhat representative figure for a lifetime median income of a worker in the US is ~2.5m [1][2] this guy is earning ~50 times that in a couple of years.

To give these figures a bit of shape. This is like getting a smarties cake[3] and giving Surojit Chatterjee pretty much the entire cake for just a couple years work. Whereas the median worker gets, for working a lifetime of effort (~45 years) about a quarter of a single smartie.

I'm not saying that everyone should earn the same but rather I would question this gap which continues to grow. This sort of payout is not aspirational IMHO but rather a symbol of a deeply dysfunctional society.

[1] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/lifetime-e... [2] I made some crass assumptions on top of these figures to make it easier for me to calculate, but its representative. [3] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/72/e8/fb/72e8fbf7cf48f45db6d8...

We need maximum wage laws. Such a law might look like this: The maximum total compensation (Salary + estimated stock grant value) must be less than some multiple of the lowest prorated total compensation of any regularly scheduled employee or contractor operating within nominal geographic limits.

Goal: Stop overpaying top staff or increase the pay of your lowest workers, including commonly outsourced positions such as janitorial staff.

The big issue is stock. It's also one that would be really, really hard to fix because of entrenched interests and wish fulfillment.

To fix it you'd have to do something like break it up into component parts:

1) Voting rights

2) Capital ownership (liquidation rights)

3) Dividend rights (aka profit sharing, pensions plans, and the like)

As well as expand the use of bonds for fundraising (including at the startup funding steps).

It will never happen due to entrenched interests (one of which is very importantly the right of legislators to own shares in companies).

I don't know. It could happen in privately owned corporations, employee owned corporations, or if shareholders of a particular company get mad about the huge payouts to fly-by-night executives. But it's unlikely.

> We need maximum wage laws.

Coinbase' last private round valuation was ~8B[1]. On its DPO day, the stock closed at ~340, giving it a valuation of ~80B, or a 10x increase in ~18 months. Options literally skyrocketed and given the time value of options, they would have been worth far more if traded directly vs a simple exercise and sell. How will you design maximum wage laws in a case where something is shooting up 10-15x in value? Rather, what we have today (progressive taxation) seems to be a right setup with some tuning needed to balance the treatment of capital gains vs wages.

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/coinbase-series-f--...

perhaps make max executive pay+benefits proportional to the lowest full-time salary+benefits with a maximum ratio? The spirit of such legislation would be that executives should then seek to increase salaries of their workers in order to then increase their own.

Executives would just contract out low-value tasks instead of hiring low-wage employees to perform them.

Sure, but when you outsource, you lose efficiency to an extent. Corporations are large because of advantages they get from centralisation resulting in administrative efficiencies and this would be forcing them to undo some of those advantages.

Pre-IPO, so surely it was options and not a stock grant? Very different risk/reward profile.

It’s a fallacy that there is a fixed amount of money to go around. Less money for this Coinbase guy doesn’t mean more money for the median worker. If anything, probably the opposite.

Yes, because he got stock as part of his compensation package. Last year it was worth more, but it's still worth a lot. If the product hadn't been successful, it would have been worth nothing. It's not a mystery at all.

> If the product hadn't been successful, it would have been worth nothing. It's not a mystery at all.

The stock is down -84.99% from IPO, seems like so far (accordingly shareholders and the financial market), the product is indeed not very successful because if it was, the price would go up, not down.

So he did a poor job, and now when sold his part of it, he got $105M.

> So he did a poor job

Or (at least partially) the surrounding market conditions have changed into unfavorable conditions for a company like Coinbase

Should a product officer be judged on whether the economy/financial markets change their mind on the value of risky things like crypto?

Plus the FTX thing most likely isn't a product officer's fault

> Should a product officer be judged on whether the economy/financial markets change their mind on the value of risky things like crypto?

Yes, absolutely. The whole point of product management is to find sustainable locations in the product space to create lasting value.

People have been warning for years that the rise of crypto was unsustainable, a grift supported by locating dumb people with dollars to cash out the people who had large supplies of magic beans to sell them.

It's not like FTX was an outlier. FTX was the largest and most spectacular failure so far. But it's part of a rich tradition of crime, grift, and plain old collapse going back at least to Mt Gox in 2014. And it's part of a large network of other failures and soon-to-be failures: https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion

Ok, bypassing anything regarding the macro-economic situation, how has the Coinbase product (successfully) changed since he was introduced in the company? As far as I know, the only change visible to users is the NFT thing, and we all know how that went.

A more interesting question I have is "why was this chief product officer granted stock worth $100m"? Somebody (one person? multiple people? a large collective group) thought they did a good enough job to grant them whatever they negotiated.

Chart comparing COIN versus BTC-USD: https://i.ibb.co/cJ3sZhD/D896-C78-E-DB0-F-48-DD-93-BB-4-D76-... (screen capture of yahoo finance).

Yes, you can see Coinbase price appears to be highly correlated with Bitcoin price.

However it is clear that Coinbase has still done very poorly: BTC is down 63% and COIN is down 84% since the IPO.

Devil's advocate: why was this chief product officer granted $100m in stock then?

The entire market is down. Sounds like every product person everywhere is doing a bad job, then.

Stock price is not a measure of product success.

> Implying that the IPO valuation was reasonable.

Full time employment is rigged. For everyone. Tech workers are just now waking up to the reality that they are the same disposable peasants like all the rest. Seeing this kind of compensation and thinking .. oh well that guy must have done hell of a job must be some kind of delusion.

Everybody is free to start their own businesses or to get hired as a CPO at a booming startup. I see a lot of people complaining, but not that many actually using those very simple rigged opportunities to make 100M fast.

There are vanishingly small number of these positions in the world, and a vanishingly small percentage of that vanishingly small number are hiring. These positions are also gated by things that commoners do not have access to, like prestigious educational backgrounds and well-connected networks of executives. Same for becoming a founder. Unless you bootstrap, the minute you want to raise funding, you're more often than not going to be blocked by those same gates.

This is a class issue, not a "seize the opportunity" issue.

I understand starting a business, but pulling off the kind of career moves the executive in question pulled off requires a level of grift that most honest people can't really fathom.

It's pure luck most of the time; right time, right place, right connections. It's not usually talent especially in crypto and other legal ponzi schemes

Why don't you have 100m? Or do you already have 100m?

I don't have 100m. I run a small bootstrapped business, and I know for a fact that running a business is a lot of hard work, so I don't share dismissive attitudes in comments.

They see themselves as temporary embarrassed millionaires.

Hoping to become part of the owning class instead of the working class.

Yet this will never happen for the vast, vast majority. But please worship PG some more.

He was a full-time employee - VP at Google before, and a PM before that... at least $300-500k/year, is that not enough or something? How does one of the highest salaried jobs around make you a 'disposable peasant'? Do you just go through life not knowing anyone on an 'average' income?

From a VC’s point of view startup VPs are disposable peasants too. And to a pension fund, VCs are disposable peasants. As someone choosing which pension fund to invest in, I’m going to chase the best return, so they’re disposable peasants to me and we’ve gone full circle. Of course there’s a name for this: a market. When the pie is growing, it’s not so bad :)

The amount of money makes one wonder about corporate governance. How can shareholders be okay with it?

They're okay with it because:

1) Originally giving large amount of stock to the C-suite was seen as a way of locking in the motives of executives to enrich the corporation (or at least bump the share price), not just themselves.

2) They stayed okay with it, and even increased the options, because it was now standard practice. And if they didn't okay it they wouldn't get the 'best' executives.

The problem with all of this is that some shareholders are longer-term holders than others. And if executives are jumping ship to get a higher payout every couple of years, then they are only incentivized to boost the share price for those couple of years (or until their options mature). So executive's motivations are only in sync with the best monetary interests of short-term shareholders.

You'd think the shareholders would design compensation policies to encourage long-term executive retention and thus long-term "shareholder value", but this doesn't seem to be the case.

Berkshire companies don't have outrageous compensation plans. There are plenty of companies that will perform well without the hundred million dollar motivation.

Agreed but...is this just a problem with the US? Does this kindof thing happen in any other country?

And if the answer is "yes, but not just to this degree"...what about relatively speaking? If country X has GDP of Y...is the ratio of executive fleecing that happens in America comparable to any other country?

Not too long ago I was playing the stock market with some spare cash and a trend I noticed was that these companies that lost more money than they were able to generate, all had well-paid executives. So you have a company that reports say a $100M loss one quarter, well it would turn out a sizable chunk of that was executive compensation. I’m not sure how I feel about execs making really any money before they’ve made the company they’re running, profitable.

I for one am very sure about how I feel about that

As we’ve just seen the easiest way to achieve profitability is layoffs. Probably not what you had in mind.

I propose instituting a 4-day workweek and cutting everyone’s pay by 10-20%. Some will no doubt resign (saving the company money), but the rest will instantly save the company 10-20% in labor costs. If all those studies out there are to be believed, productivity would remain the same or increase (although in those studies pay wasn’t cut along with hours, so… maybe not).

Anyway now seems like a great opportunity for companies to experiment with 4-day workweeks, whether 40 hours (better than nothing) or 32 hours.

>Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday

in US dollars and not in crypto-baloney, let us add.

That's an insult to baloney - at least baloney has the intrinsic value wherein it can be metabolized into calories.

It's especially insulting not to spell it correctly. Bologna.

Meaning number (2)

https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/baloney

I happen to be from Italy, btw. And hate bologna.

(The sausage, or whatever it is, not the city)

like it or not baloney is a word. Informal, but you'll still find it in dictionaries.

Sounds like a whole lot of bologna to me

I bet the 950 people let go a few weeks ago and the 1,100 let go back in June must love hearing this news.

A needed dip in the bubble and all of the sudden HN goes from market capitalist to left leaning. This person sold their stock, the time for employees to complain was when he was given this equity a couple of years ago.

Nope. They can also complain now. And forevermore if they want. None of us, you included, is obligated to protect grifters from the criticism of people who suffer while they walk away laughing.

They can complain now but it reeks of jealously instead of actual anger at the “grift.” When conditions were different nobody cares this dude got a ton of equity because they got equity as well.

It might be jealousy. But it also could be that they're just now realizing how they got taken, and to what extent.

Which would be unsurprising, as plenty of startups puff up expectations and take advantage of the young and naive. I have relatively little sympathy for Coinbase employees, as I think the whole thing was a scam built on scams, so it was always a question of who gets screwed. But I have some sympathy for the ones who were early enough in their careers that they didn't really have the chance to learn how rotten the world can get in spots.

As opposed to reeking of being an edgy contrarian?

And they look like jealous fools. Who got conned, exactly?

Yes, people generally flip views once material conditions change. Also, when the tide goes out, everyone who was swimming naked is revealed. As it turns out, ZIRP was allowing many companies to swim naked.

1 I was always left

2 America is something to be avoided at all cost- even the right wing parties think it is a nightmare situation

I checked the list they refered to: https://www.equilar.com/reports/95-table-equilar-new-york-ti...

And damn, top guy got paid almost a billion. Also, the top two guys are Brigham Young alumni.

All the FAANG CEOs are represented besides Sundar Pichai. I looked it up and his compensation was $2M ($6M with stock). Wild that the Amazon CEO got paid over $200M more than him.

$6M seems rather small for Google's CEO compensation. Did Sundar take a huge paycut?

Wow, someone at Qualtrics got paid half a billion to oversee a 50% drop in their stock price?

man, I should have done that MBA...

Edit: To be fair, the top guy is also the company's founder. Props to him.

This is surreal to read. Can anyone please explain how is it possible for the board to value so much someone?

I don't see what can possibly justify this kind of compensation...

not so much the board as Brian Armstrong himself. he seems to have a history of very dubious C-suite hires, including acquihiring Balaji's Earn.com for $100m and constantly talking up his impact when it turned out to be.. a shitty e-learning platform (https://www.coinbase.com/learning-rewards)

(i know i sound negative about all this but if i'm mistaken about Earn please correct me)

Balaji pulled off a heck of a heist himself. Partner at A16Z, spin out some bizarre crypto oil-cooled mining company, pivot like 4-5 times, and then have Coinbase, the company with your VC partners on the board "acquire" your failed startup for 10 figures after it's already burned through over $100M of investor money. These dudes just begging the SEC to get involved in VC deals.

dont take away agency from Brian. by all accounts an excellent founder, enthusiastically supporting Balaji even after Earn was effectively shut down. Brian's vocal support is the one reason I still doubt my own assessment of Earn.

How many of this industry’s thought leaders are similarly scummy?

His equity was presumably worth much less when it was given to him.

He joined around a year ago, it is now worth 72% less than when he joined.

Possibly part of the reason to depart? A $70M comp cut and little hope of it recovering seems a good reason

I wish I could attach a graph of the COIN stock price starting from the IPO. It's a nice and steady downward trend all the way to -85%.

this is what we call stealing a living.

to ya tech minions - slaving every day because some higher up said jira tickets gotta be complete.

dude made more money in two years than you would have made working 10 years at coinbase as an IC.

--also edit

Stock options are a bad way to pay people. Perverse incentives - the holder of stock options doesn't take risk in the way a normal way a stockholder does. a stock option holder isn't there for the long term.

if I had a company - you won't get stock options. you will get decent pay. and loan to buy company stock at public prices

This seems like an awfully high compensation package for someone who only joined around the time of the IPO.

I can’t think of anything CB put out during his tenure that was interesting at all. IIRC, he was a driving the push for Coinbase NFT which flopped massively.

Not sure the exact timeline for these, but what about staking and yields, integration of Coinbase Pro with the main site, and a more robust Tax Center? Those all seemed pretty useful to me. Pretty sure all those were within the last couple of years.

Yeah, at a 11 b market cap, he got 1% for joining? That's amazing.

One of the biggest compensation packages I've ever heard of (600M+ in 5 years) and he walked away a year in. Wow.

I doubt he voluntarily walked away…the only product he launched, the Coinbase NFT marketplace, flopped and the general crypto slump has also affected the company.

> “As our product leaders have taken on more responsibility, I've been able to consider taking a much-needed personal break to spend more time with my family. It has been a tough year for me personally — my father was diagnosed with Alzheimer's disease, and my mother passed away unexpectedly. If I'm honest with myself, I don't think I've allowed myself time to grieve either yet,” he wrote in a recent LinkedIn post.

https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reflecting-my-crypto-web3-jou...

Maybe these people absolutely no heart at all but I'd be a tiny bit surprised if he actually mentioned his mothers death and father getting Alzheimer's as the reason for leaving when in reality he was fired.

I wouldn't be surprised. "spend more time with family" is a classic lie when fired.

E.g., this article from 2013: https://patch.com/virginia/oakton/what-resigning-to-spend-mo...

Or this, from 2006: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/business/23family.html

If he just said "spend more time with family", then I agree, it sounds like a cop-out. But specifically referring to actual life events? Less likely to be cop-out, at least that's the feeling I get.

What a POS - we had to continue to work while caring for a family member with Alzheimer's, their death, and the death of another family member. I'm sure many of his reports had to continue to work though similar situations.

Not sure why the outburst man. His mom died, it's a valid reason to not want to work for a bit, and why would you if you had 105 million

This is why we need robust paid family medical leave as a society.

These tech companies just print shares for comp like its nothing

3 years in

It seems completely crazy that they'd need to pay him $600m of equity at signing. Like why not close him with a package of (say) $200m? Even if he was making $5m annual TC at Google, that would still be 10x his comp in equity alone.

This of course is not what happened. The article explains. He was granted stock at a much (much) cheaper price.

The biggest news in this article is that coinbase is still worth over $10bn. The crypto scam looks dead but it's still moving.

NKLA market cap still hovers around $1.3B. So yeah, anything is possible.

I would like it to stay afloat till the summer, then vacation, then finding a real job.

Edit : it’s not fair, we do work. Like a real job, but it feels … ethereal

Looking at your comments it feels like your employer could identify you. A friendly reminder to be aware of that.

Headlines from last week:

> It was announced on Jan. 10, 2022 that Coinbase would be slashing its workforce by about 20% (which translates to 950 employees) in an effort to reduce overall operating expenses by 25%.

> This is the second round of layoffs for the crypto exchange, as they laid off 18% of the workforce last June as the crypto winter sets in and the space attempts to recover from the disastrous year.

why exactly is this guy getting $105m again?

Because he got it as a compensation when they hired him? Now he is just selling his stake after he left.

HN is advocating for crawling back previously agreed compensation if an employee doesn't do their jobs well.

Oh boy. Software engineers would be in shambles.

As someone who has lost his mother unexpectedly last year, and my father suffered from a brain hemorrhage leading to dementia ... and I can very much empathize with the instinct to stop working and take a long break.

I hope you don’t believe him. He’s leaving because he has $105m and his options are underwater. See ya, suckers!

The article listed his options price at $18.71, so even with a slump in the share price they're still valuable, albeit a large multiple less

Sorry for your losses. I hope you are doing okay and are taking a long break if that's what you desire...but not too long. The world benefits from your software and insights.

HN is so weird when it comes to anything related to crypto.

Guys if you hate “capital”, then maybe stop hanging out on a news website run by and started by a venture capitalists and populated by people who are either participating in or funding startups themselves.

This guy took a compensation package that both he and the company agreed to. He then sold the compensation package.

There’s no scandal here. Good for him.

> populated by people who are either participating in or funding startups themselves

Citation needed.

As far as I see it, that was his employment contract. Good for him. Companies can't retroactively change employment contracts in case of contingencies, and that's very good for all of us.

(I am not a lawyer).

Article says "...Ford's revenues are five times the size of Coinbase's...". Isn't it more like 69x (Q3: Ford $39.4B and Coinbase: $576M).

10b5-1 sales is also the default model for execs who have MNPI.

From the article > According to the SEC, chief operating officer Emilie Choi booked $106 million in stock sales that same year.

So it's less that they overpaid him and more that all of the exec team other than Armstrong didn't believe in crypto and sold their a chunk options pretty much as they vested

Joke's on him; dude got paid in fiat!

If the majority of this is from selling his stock, and the stock is down 85% since the IPO, how much would he have had if the stock hadn’t tanked?

Edit: I missed it the first time, but the article actually answers this: $646 million.

The 105 Mio. figure includes stock sales when the price was still high.

So, the ship is sinking?

Probably the other way round. They’re getting rid of a product officer who has no faith in his product.

few understand

Damn, it feels good to be a ~~gangster~~crypto CPO

But yeah, it’s software engineers that are paid too much. I wonder why billionaires never fight for lower pay for C-level staff.

The inequality in our country is astounding.

At least he didn't talk about politics at work. Can't put a price tag on that!

I think it's time for me transition into a product role...

It's amazing how much some can milk a company

Apropos of nothing I am reminded of one of Woody Allens earlier, funnier movies. It was called Take the Money and Run.

Nice. Very nice.

Now let's see Paul Allen's comp package.

His quartz kitchen is going to have epic waterfalls.

the last person to make millions on crypto.

All I can say is, damn, props to him. Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history and delivering so little value in return is the kind of heist we should all aspire towards.

This philosophy of praising exploitation is actually one of the things I liked least about America and one of the things I found most refreshing when I emigrated. It's pervasive through American society that pulling the wool over the eyes of shadowy entities (large corporations, the government etc...) is a virtue but every time it's done it pulls a lot of money out of the hands of people that could use it more and further concentrates wealth. It's also part of the virtue package that allowed a recent presidential candidate to proudly proclaim that they'd not share their tax returns while talking about how much money they'd fleeced the government for and they were openly praised for these actions while running for the highest office.

Yes coinbase is a pretty shifty entity and probably didn't deserve so much funding in the first place but this individual managing to walk away with such an insane amount of money while making no contribution even approaching this level of value doesn't deserve praise - they're a prime example of the rot that is deeply set in America and causing wealth inequality to spiral out of control.

Generally I agree but this is crypto. Crypto is 100% zero-sum or negative-sum. The whole space is predicated on trying to take money from other participants rather than actually creating value. Creating at best the illusion of value is the goal. This guy nailed it.

It's not like he took $100M from an orphanage or something.

This guy was a part of creating that negative sum game in the first place. He shouldn’t be celebrated.

I agree that crypto is 100% negative-sum in my experience. (Especially the ones that are proof of work which literally destroys our one biosphere through wasting electricity.)

Most recently, I got a "legitimate" (doxxed, "real") job offer via HN, got hired and scammed, wasted hours of my time. Crypto is scamsville.

Not quite orphanages, but it's definitely poor people:

* Locked out of traditional financial industry, more people of color are turning to cryptocurrency [0]

* Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard [1]

[0] https://archive.is/slVPj

[1] https://archive.is/KhbuI

Would say in all seriousness while nodding at your comment that America was founded on exploitation, not just of natives and Africans but of future waves of immigrants as well, etc, and of the idea of the supremacy of the owner class (within which there was some relative, legally enshrined equality). The history of America is literally one of enabling experimentation and innovation in exploitation, of the framing that there are suckers and subordinates born every minute. This is the case in every single business domain, and is as or more true today as it ever has been. The true equality in America is that anyone and everyone can be cheated and dominated (of course some more easily/painfully than others). This unbroken lineage of inherent danger leads to the rise of (in some cases famous/legendary/mythologized) collectives and movements that attempt to enshrine rights and protections. One does not exist without the other.

As a first-generation immigrant I completely disagree with your framing here and it makes me sad that you view the United States in such an incredibly dismal way. There are many problems here, to be sure, but the US is undoubtedly one of the best places in the world to live, and, like very few other countries, tries to improve on its past, generation after generation.

Forgive me, the intent was not to communicate a dismal attitude. Agree completely that it is one of the best places to live and all the rest.

I personally find the mental model that includes the dynamics of dominance and subjugation along with the responses of solidarity and resistance extremely helpful in understanding the world as a whole. Why are things a certain way etc? Because of X.

It is a physics, and is more completely predictive and reliable than a mental model that sees only oppression and anxiety (as many people are limited to) or one that sees only ambition and advantage (as many peoples' blinders dictate).

Going further, I would argue that the existence of exploitation in a system is in fact essential, as is providing tools to resist and join and brace against it. But eliminating it is impossible and a non-goal.

> America was founded on exploitation, not just of natives and ...

I believe these criticisms are true of essentially everywhere on earth. How much of Germany was French for a time or a vassal state of this one lord or another? Africa, the continent that invented slavery still enslaves people to this day. The Native Americans themselves faught with one another for land and treasure. Going back far enough, we cro magnons stole neanderthal land.

The United States didn't pop into existence in 1776 bringing with it some sort absolute barbarity that previously never existed, it's the other way around, the world was pretty backward and barbaric until the Americans got around to fixing it.

This is why the comment resonates—the "owner class" got swindled. Fatcats, not the littleguys.

For what it's worth, I think GP was being sarcastic.

Oh I'm not being sarcastic. The lemmings at the top of most tech companies are highly overpaid and continually fuck up Their One Job. The rare person who manages to trick them into paying a lot for little-to-no services has figured out the game and deserves some praise.

EDIT: apparently I was wrong and the poster was not sarcastic.

(I thought it was Poe's law.)

I agree. And often, people don't draw the line at corporations. So many people in America are willing to screw over others if it means another dollar in their pocket.

The base elements of human nature do not care about national borders. I think you'll find such people, in similar proportion, in most places around the world.

"Fucking over others for personal gain" is actually not a "base element of human nature"! Plenty of other cultures are more altruistic, more about raising everyone up.

This philosophy of praising exploitation

I read that comment as sarcastic. I don't think your parent comment is praising him

> This philosophy of praising exploitation

FWIW the parent you are replying to was clearly jesting with some sarcasm and not actually praising it in the way you seem to think.

EDIT: apparently not, according to the other replies by that parent. But looks like several of us read sarcasm into the comment.

In the 90s, my relatives first came to the US. In those days, there were newspaper dispensing machines on the sidewalk, which worked like this:

1. It was a box on the sidewalk with a locked swing-out door facing forward.

2. You put coins into the machine and the door unlocks.

3. Inside are all the newspapers. You put your hand in and take only one.

4. You close the door and it locks.

The first thing my relatives asked after seeing this was "why do you only take one?"

If you model society as a Nash equilibrium, the impulse to veer towards social betrayal is present in all people and societies. It's an obvious instinct and the fact that people are so open about indulging it only indicates that we're returning to the historic mean for humans, that the trust required to have a society based on mutual cooperation is vanishing. The only galling thing here is that the people to whom the most social benefits flow -- software engineers, product managers, executives -- are so brazen about betraying it, or cheering the betrayal of others.

I don't know where you emigrated to, but unless it's Saudi Arabia or Singapore, I would doubt your observation. Americans and Euros have a tendency to view everyone else as Rousseau's "noble savage", i.e. a romanticized alien.

I emigrated up to Canada and it certainly is still present here but it isn't nearly as praised. In Vancouver a "starter" home is valued in the millions so wealth inequality is very much present here as well - but there is much more of a social rejection of wealth acquisition through under handed means. Trudeau got into a lot of political trouble over SNC-Lavlin and Doug Ford is currently getting a lot of crap over handouts of park lands to developer buddies. I don't want it to sound like everything is perfect but when people acquire power or wealth through exploitation they actually suffer for it up here instead of it being viewed as a virtue.

On the one hand, I guess you need a certain level of social trust for newspaper dispensing machines to work. On the other hand, there's very little value to be gained by taking 10 newspapers. I suppose you can hawk them on the street for a discount but the benefit is pretty small.

I agree with you. I thought GP was sarcasm... but these days who can even tell. Including the people writing/saying... I don't know if this is a USA thing or a more global thing, but I think a lot of people literally don't know if they are being sarcastic or not, sarcasm is so pervasive.

I think it's more of a sarcastic / cynical take - kind of a "you reap what you sow" sentiment. This IS what capitalism is, with a weak social safety net and without controls on the accumulation of stupid levels of capital. If you don't believe that the people who invested in Coinbase should have had the ability to fling around billions of dollars on a whim, then it's difficult to feel bad when they spend it poorly.

> This philosophy of praising exploitation

I assumed the poster was being ironic.

Which countries have you lived in? Fleecing large orgs (corporations, the government etc) is seen as a Robin Hood virtue in many if not most countries in the world.

i'm pretty sure the comment, to which you responded, is a joke. i mean, the second sentence is overtly sarcastic.

if not intended as sarcastic, it works as sarcasm quite well!

I am almost certain that GP was being sarcastic.

It's because he exploited wealthy people.

Always surprising to me how many peoples’ moral framework is essentially the Code of Hammurabi with a few layers of indirection.

Nah, it's because he exploited crypto people.

It’s not pervasive. Pound yourself in the face with sand everyday and you’ll think there’s sand everywhere.

There are 100s of millions of people in the US.

The largest financial crime in the US pretty much every year is wage theft. Wage theft isn't the grand larceny of millions - it's small business owners shaving tens or hundreds of dollars off the paychecks of people who are too powerless to object and accept the mistreatment because it keeps them out of poverty.

This is an issue from the top to the bottom.

We romanticize it when it's punching up (like at a crypto company that's probably been responsible for bankrupting a whole lot of suckers) but accepting it as a virtue also lets all those terrible bosses bask in the glory of how "keen" they're being by shaving off a bit extra for the retirement fund but punching down.

There's two ways to succeed (oversimplification): being conniving and being smart.

In an environment like the USA (where many of the world's smartest tend to flock and extreme wealth is relatively achievable), being conniving is rarer than being smart, so that's what people value.

I hope rarity is not your only marker for value. Otherwise I do have a rag to sell you which I've been using for 5 years now. Totally unique, nothing else like that.

For me there are two worlds:

- The world of Competition: Domination by action until one reaches a point of coldness that one loses oneself creating a "dark night of the soul" bringing change

- The world of Love: All efforts are aligned to create well being by avoiding harm of oneself and others.

If you are in the world of Competition, you will see the world in terms of black and white, gain and loss. Even my statement will be seen as a fool's position. One has to make a living in the world, even at the expense of others.

If you are in the world of Love, you will see the service you provide to others is an asset and you don't have to think about "Making it in the world", harming others at you own benefit because the world provides for you exactly what you need and you some how escape all of the consequences of others you have chosen the path of competition.

Which ever side you choose, will be the world you create for yourself and others. Right now the world of competition dominates, but it won't always be that way. Eventually we will all come-around, to love :D

Natural laws are neither cruel or kind. The are absolutely just. The cruelty of [competition] is a passing phase of evolution. - James Allen "The Competitive Laws & The Law Of Love"

He's walking with around a sixth of all money raised by the company [1]

Might as well treat the execs and all VCs involved to a luxurious "fuck you" dinner!

[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coinbase/company_fin...

all stock sales though.... so techncially your money (if you hold coinbase stock retail)

Yep, the better comparison would be a % of Coinbase's market cap which is $11B. Still, as far as I know, walking away with 1% of your company's market cap is rare for a non-founder hired only 2 years prior.

Yea don't hold me for the rigor of my statement, it was just a comparison of magnitude.

You're right that they've already passed the bag to investors, possibly a lot of that to retail - they can all still have a nice "fuck you" dinner in their honor!

I have to say... there's something kind of demoralizing about this and some of the other shenanigans happening right now.

I'm part of a local YIMBY group advocating for more housing and you see some really rough stories about people who are employed, work hard, and still can't put a roof over their heads. And then you see stuff like this.

/rant

I feel you. All we can do is vote and treat people who are worse off as human beings.

I'm fortunate to live in a country that has a social safety net.

> Tricking the coinbase execs into giving him one of the highest paying packages for any product exec in history

The money was primarily generated from stock and options sales, not salary. If anything, it would be institutional investors who financed this. The fact that he happened to be on a Rule 10b5-1 plan further cements this; he didn't even control the timing of the sales.

GP carefully said "package," not salary. Package includes stock compensation.

What I mean to say is that compensation is typically negotiated as a _number of shares_, not as a dollar value. The fact that outside investors wanted to pay a surprisingly high amount for those shares is on them.

If your company says "we're going to pay you $400,000 and a commemorative water bottle", it's hardly fleecing the company if someone else wants to pay $40M for the water bottle.

Fair point. I am generally opposed to crime, legal and otherwise. But stealing from the grifters not only has a certain moral justice to it, it might even be a net social positive.

He's like Omar.

That did cross my mind! But what makes Omar different is that he understood his place in the world and was honest about it. Both with himself and with the world: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=P3i36ybA8Ms

Omar is a fictional character, but I would like to believe if he had managed to acquire far far more than he needed for a basically comfortable lifestyle, he would have shared a lot of it.

Farmer and the Dell intensifies

> and delivering so little value in return is the kind of heist

How do we evaluate/measure if that is true or not?

https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-just-like-your-opinion-...

The literal collapse of an institution is a pretty A+ indicator of failure of leadership

Not necessarily. If your market evaporates, you can't really blame it on product.

At the same time, if you're the leader of a product that's going to succeed no matter what, maybe you shouldn't get paid $105 million.

> you can't really blame it on product

indeed you can

If it is extremely hard to attribute outcomes to individual contribution, maybe no one should get the $105m?

This is like saying banks should not manage risk. I am sure that if you put your bucks in a bank account you want to seem them there when you check your balances otherwise you know who you will be blaming.

Also, ask CEOs and Chief Risk Officers from financial institutions if they worry about evaporations. I am not surprised though about him walking away with the money and your comment in the crypto world.

Coinbase didn’t do enough to thwart the massive fraud and youtube-deepfake-powered-heists going on. Lots of sheep lost lots of money and look where we are now. The crypto winter will last 50 years.

Yeah but that's not what Coinbase was. It was a industry leader. I think we can blame industry leaders if the industry evaporates like this.

>If your market evaporates, you can't really blame it on product.

Come again?

Dang is Coinbase collapsing?

Collapsing is a strong word, but their very tightly tied to whatever the crypto market is doing..which is not good at the moment.

From a quick glance at their financials, they lost about a billion dollars in the past year but still have $7 billion in working capital. I think they'll be fine.

What would dang know about it?

LOL… typical HN tying a market being in a downturn to a company for trading securities “collapsing.”

Probably the same type that associates tech debt with “company is on the decline” despite strong revenue.

bitcoin is up 25% in a month : https://finance.yahoo.com/quote/BTC-USD?p=BTC-USD

My understanding is that his big project was the release of the Coinbase NFT marketplace.

wasn't he in charge of their NFT product?

This is pretty telling: https://dune.com/cryptuschrist/Coinbase-NFT

$482 worth of volume traded in the last 24 hours. I don't know what their fees are, but if its like OpenSea (2.5%), then they made...$12 yesterday.

The good old a16z heist. Rugpull on investors after.

I've defended crypto in the past but its increasingly clear that this is all basically academic BS, but with a financial component. Theoretically, its nice to have a "digital gold" alternative to store your wealth away from authoritarian governments. But most of crypto thrives in countries with strong democratic traditions and no history of extended and widespread government overreach.

All the other aspects of crypto - DeFi, NFTs, GameFi - are nice for making money but no one asked for them, and no one realy needs them.

They're fun to use and fun to gamble and play around with, but its all...useless. Especially for the existing users. DeFi, in its current form, isn't "banking the unbanked" - its just a place for the world's 1% to screw around on.

I understand the promise, but I also think the product is far, far from what the world needs or even wants.

This is certainly the way it should be done in the crypto world.

Absolutely not. That's morally awful.

A society that rewards its very worst people with money and power is a society on the way down.

Investors buying into crypto... "aaaaand it's gone." .. into the pockets of guys like him

These comments don’t really address opportunity costs. It’s the same concept where why are we paying non profit CEOs so much but when you think about it those CEOs could have just worked for a much higher salary anywhere else .

The cheap money era is gone now though.

That's a fallacy, those CEO's wouldn't be elsewhere making more, otherwise they would. That's just a trick they use to convince people of supporting with (in most cases tax free donations) their ridiculous life style. Another reason I prefer donating directly to people who need it, or volunteering. A person who is making 3M/year in an organization, is not the "sacrifice myself for the people" type, let's stop fouling ourselves.

>>why are we paying non profit CEOs

And anyone with a "foundation" (recall sarah palin's daughter getting paid some ridiculous amount for her :foundation" to fight teen-pregnancy after been a pregnant teen??

Fwiw I would trust a person who has gone through teen pregnancy to understand what kind problems it has. Just like people who didn't get to go to good schools establish scholarships. In isolation, those are the people who will understand the issue much more.

True, but her "foundation" was taking 'donations' and paying her ~$450,000 a year as ceo...

And then evaporated I believe and dont think she had any impact on the problem.

By "so little value" are you saying that whatshisface was/is a bad product leader or are you saying that it's impossible for anything to be valuable when it's crypto-adjacent?

Coinbase seems to have from the very beginning overindexed on "resume" hires and not people who actually care about crypto eg Ivy League/Google/TradFi hires.

That the most unique take I've read on this. Any more details or are you just speaking from experience?

Not sure what you mean. Feel free to look at the background of all the big hires they've made. It's lots of Ivy League/Google/LinkedIn/Banking/Consulting people.

Yeah but how do you know those were not crypto enthu people? I've seen crypto enthusiasts in all walks of society. I thought there was more detail to what you were saying.

Doesn't sound like any trickery was involved. Relatively standard high profile options package. He got really, really, really lucky in terms of timing and mechanics.

What makes you say the value of their contribution is minor? Is there some public basis for that sort of claim to be found elsewhere?

Coinbase is down 88% from all time highs, and slightly less from its IPO. Coinbase has an $11.6b market cap which means he extracted a little under 1% of the entire company’s value in two years.

> Coinbase is down 88% from all time highs, and slightly less from its IPO.

This has nothing to do with "product", though.

Memestocks are down ~80%. Crypto prices down ~70%. Volumes are down even more in many segments... >97% for NFTs.

Just because Coinbase was at one time valued almost 10x what it is now, doesn't mean that was the correct value - and "product" ruined it.

Yeah, but isn't it the chief product officers job to figure out how to isolate their company from this?

Yes but if you look at the balance sheet they have about 6 billion in net assets (assets minus liabilities) so the value of the company itself is really more like 5.6 billion. This is a little tricky because company valuation in many cases is a combination of the value of owned assets and the expected value of the actual operations of the company.

So he really extracted more like 2% of the value of the operations of company itself.

https://twitter.com/Carnage4Life/status/1522046933258293248

This is his legacy

excellent context, thank you

> What makes you say the value of their contribution is minor?

Excluding the stock performance entirely, they've released no particularly successful or even interesting products under his tenure.

He comes from Google where he worked on ads and shopping, so honestly that tracks pretty well. Google (not Alphabet) hasn't done anything interesting or innovative in a long time now either.

Umm have your seen what their financial performance? At least somewhat fair that you know Coinbase's product has some impact on stock price!

Buddy, have you ever heard of this thing called "cryptocurrency"?

I can't tell if you're serious or not (the aspire towards part).

100% serious.

If capital is planning on being this dumb, as labor I have no problem whatsoever relieving them of their monetary burdens.

I'm surprised anyone thinks this might not be intended seriously. It's a pretty common sentiment among the working class. Stole from the little people? You suck. Ripped off the owning class? Nice job, please do more of that.

It is common to everyone. Proof: wage theft is about $1 Billion a year. https://www.epi.org/publication/wage-theft-2021/ The post is interesting that someone actually working got money out of a company.

It's simply turnabout. The owning class regularly, illegally, rips off the working class and gets away with it because it's so difficult to prove in courts.

This isn't stealing though. The owning class agreed to this.

It’s not even about stealing. With 100m I would have the resources to found multiple companies that could fix real problems and provide good paying jobs.

I mean, who's ripping off? It's a legal contract.

Yeah, while I think this is ridiculous, if some company wants to pay me millions of dollars regardless of the companies performance then sign me up.

dont forget how much google is still paying android founder's golden parachute after the many sexual accusations against him...

I think he beats this.

yes, but "android founder." What great product innovation did this guy pioneer at CB? Any justification at all for a $100M payday?

Fair, but the issue was being paid $90,000,000 a year to leave the company because too many women accused him of sexual assault....

He built their $400/day volume NFT marketplace

You may not agree with it but you gotta respect the hustle.

Why? Why do you have to respect this hustle?

Crypto companies were starving for talent, eager to pull people in from the "Web 2.0" world with lavish salaries. He recognized their desperation and negotiated a gigantic executive comp package. Also accurately sized-up Brian Armstrong as a lightweight who will eagerly sign-on anyone who strokes his ego.

His major accomplishment was the Coinbase NFT marketplace and then checked out. He spent all of 2022 doing god-tier quiet-quitting.

He's not the only one whose done this: Balaji Srinivasan got hired on and did something similar with Coinbase's learning platform. Massive comp packages for executives doing C- work and still collecting atta-boys from the CEO. That guy used shareholder money to shitpost on twitter and build his personal brand.

This is like the opposite of hustle. Don't you think you are supporting getting massive compensation for essentially being bad at your job? Do you think it's ok because it happens to a large corporation? I can understand feeling happy at the big corporation's misery but respect isn't what is owed to this dude.

Edit: Another thing, at least some of that shareholder money came from retail investors. Even if it's 1% it's still over a million dollars scammed from just the normal people.

What exactly is this site solving? I'm asking because I don't know

It lets one buy Bitcoin (etc) with US Dollars.

Another site that makes millions from shitcoin bullshit as I understand it

Sells unlicensed securities to people with a gambling-addict mindset.

Fools weren't being separated from their money quickly enough

And the money has to come from somewhere, unless they are paid in NFT/e-coin.

I wonder if Congress plans to do anything about executive compensation yet.

Yeah, I hate it when people exchange money for goods and services in a non-coercive, mutually agreed transaction. There oughta be a law!

These executive salaries ara usually shareholder's money (like the whole business), and the problem is that shareholders are often too distributed and don't have enough control to do anything about it.

> the problem is that shareholders are often too distributed and don't have enough control to do anything about it

Any examples to cite? Because I can't think of an example of a single company where this is true.

Usually it's a small group of shareholders that hold more than 50% of the company, making it essentially theirs as they hold a winning number of votes. They run it in a way that benefits them, placing their people on the Board of Directors, setting their goals, which the C's just follow. Sure the C's get paid well, but that's negotiated with the Board (who represents the majority shareholders).

I'll concede that sometimes, when the majority shareholder is also in the C-suite, you see more blatant "take from the company and give to myself" behavior. But as the majority shareholder it's effectively their company, and they can do what they want with what they own (basic freedoms I think we all agree on?). For example, Elon, as majority shareholder, could simply liquidate Tesla and pocket his share of the sale. It's his company.

Poorly run companies usually have a poor Board of Directors. This usually happens when the majority shareholders are short sighted and prioritize short term profit over long term growth.

I've seen situations where the company/board claws back money after a C leaves, because the C was negligent/dishonest in their doings.

In all of the above cases, the shareholders are the one's holding the cards. I can't think of a single case where the board conspired with the C's to fleece the shareholders. To do so would likely result in criminal charges.

Mostly agree, but this part isn't really true:

>But as the majority shareholder it's effectively their company, and they can do what they want with what they own (basic freedoms I think we all agree on?). For example, Elon, as majority shareholder, could simply liquidate Tesla and pocket his share of the sale. It's his company.

Minority shareholder oppression is a thing.

Not these days. Blackrock et al. hold big enough stakes in the big companies that they'll be listened to if they complain.

Regardless though, why would the government be better at protecting shareholder interests than... the shareholders?

I don't know. Do you think a congressperson is more likely to listen to you, or someone with 100 million dollars?

And how much is the average employee making? Honestly I'm down for making a law that says in order to pay execs more, they have to pay their workers more.

Even at a 50 to 1 ratio of worker to exec, they can still make more money but increase the wealth of the workers at the same time.

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