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Comment by rideontime | Hacker News Reader

He’s still not answering the question on everyone’s mind: did he take a pay cut?

He literally owns Epic and is worth billions. His rather small $1m/year CEO salary is peanuts in comparison to his net worth and other CEO salaries. Asking this question shows you care more about the optics than the substance of someone cutting their pay. Even if he cut it to $0 it'd be irrelevant as he's not sacrificing anything in the process.

"simpsons weird nerds defending elon musk from valid criticism".gif but for Tim Sweeney

You do understand what owning the company means, right? Everything paid to employees beyond the legal minimum is essentially coming 50+% from his pocket. And not paying himself doesn't mean much when that just means Epic keeps the money which is half owned by his anyway. Thus my point that you care more about the optics than the reality of helping those laid off.

You're making the opposite argument to what you think you are. Your points support that he should cut his $1m/salary to 0 and allow 3-10 other employees to stay on.

You think I'm defending him. I'm not. He could take out a loan against his $5+ billion ownership stake to help keep 100+ employees on. He's not. He's prioritizing the future growth and value of the company despite having the choice not to. You however are too busy being distracted by the shiny toy to realize how much he isn't doing.

$1m/year is not a small amount of money at all.

He doesn't need more money. He has no descendants, and he only buys terrains to preserve the mountains ;-)

I wish the Unreal Tournament still existed and not the kid's game Fortnite.

It seems that Western society is divided over the question as to whether or not employers have some broader duty of care to their employees beyond the economic arrangement of employment.

If the CEO of a factory had to sell half their maintenance-hungry machines to balance the budget, do they owe it to the sold or retained machines to take a pay cut so they "share in the harm of the layoffs"?

The factory machine example is silly because they are machines and offensive because many people would agree that employees are very much not machines.

> If the CEO of a factory had to sell half their maintenance-hungry machines to balance the budget...

... then they're clearly in dire straits and the company should be looking at any cut they could make including the CEO's compensation. Payment in stock devalues the stock; payment in cash decreases the runway.

He literally owns half the very much not public company.

Is the reality of their dire straits really so clear? And the connection of those dire straits to CEO compensation?

I agree, that is a very silly example.

I was hoping somebody would pick up what I was trying to put down, which is that there's a fuzzy spectrum between silly examples and a self-evident duty of care between employers and employees.

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