... And getting caught flat-footed against Microsoft (and Adobe, but but not as loudly) in the precise field Alphabet is supposedly the insurmountable leader.
Remind me again how big-co CEOs assume "all the risk"?
Remind me again how big-co CEOs assume "all the risk"?
If the CEO of Google gets fired, he just ends up as the CEO of another Fortune 500 company.
If he can't even land that role, he can just go around pocketing $50k/event speaking fee. Of course, that's only if he doesn't want to degrade himself by taking on a VP-level role at another Fortune 500 company.
$218M of it is a stock grant on a 3 year schedule, so no, it is not.
That's a fairytale almost as preposterous as the tooth fairy.
That right there is more evidence for the tooth fairy than you’ll ever find in favor of CEOs assuming risk.
I quit my $400k/yr fintech job to be CEO of a company whose primary customers use our tool to make Trump and Biden video game memes on TikTok.
Does anyone seriously believe this? I see it all the time as a "comeback" against CEOs, but I don't think I've ever seen anyone arguing that they actually are the ones that assume all the risk.
Though he isn't injecting his money back into the company.
Full responsibility, but not too much.
i.e. a lead surgeon can and should take "full responsibility" for what happens in the OR, but they obviously neither can nor will (and I also don't think should) shoulder "all the risk" for what happens in the OR (or even most of it).
They are essentially celebrities with a personal brand that corporations will hire to have the celebrity’s name as head the org.
A good celebrity can bring fresh energy and new atmosphere to an organisation.
It’s unclear whether the average CEO is worth their compensation, but what is clear is that bad leadership can tank an organisation to zero.
I have never once heard anyone make this claim.
For instance, see [0] below by fallingknife.
This is not what we're talking about. This is about risk to the company, not risk to the CEO.
"Essentially CEOs are able to hold the board hostage."
Exactly. There is no risk to the CEO. They hold all the cards.
Who specifically said they assume "all the risk" that we are refuting here?
What we actually have here and with CEO pay in general at large organizations is what’s pretty well known as a principal/agent problem, where the manager class sets the rules for themselves in a way that results in the transfer of assets from shareholders to themselves.
1. Not all incentive packages are tied to share price. Many of them are tied to other metrics that the (shareholder elected) board decide are appropriate. This is where the bulk of Pichai’s comp comes from.
2. When they are tied to share price, they tend to be benchmarked. In this case Pichai’s share price incentives have been benchmarked against the S&P100, against which Google has been doing perfectly well. The reason for this is because directors generally don’t task CEOs with preventing economic downturns, and they typically want any incentives they create to be as effective under those conditions as they would be at any other time.
The shareholders are absolutely setting the rules for the executives here.
Riding the wave of market alpha is not an accomplishment.
These are very simple concepts, and while you can be forgiven for not already knowing them, aspiring to retain your ignorance certainly isn’t admirable.
The real people who “take all the risk” are the investors (and they obviously don’t take “all” the risk). Somehow this platitude started getting applied to executives, but that has always been based on a misunderstanding of how executive comp is typically structured.
Where does Adobe fit into this, are they even competitors?
Notice how everyone in this thread is calling Sundar out and not other people in the org who may be at fault too? It's the buck stops here thing.
https://www.forbes.com/sites/richardnieva/2023/03/10/google-...
[0] https://www.law.cornell.edu/uscode/text/15/7241