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Comment by derstander | Hacker News Reader

> That seems like a reasonable amount for the CEO of a massive health care system. Not an easy business to manage and someone who can manage a business that large could do lots of other things.

As far as US CEO salaries go, I agree that it doesn’t sound particularly egregious.

Compare that with, say, Nintendo’s President, who makes the equivalent of $2.4 million.

https://www.nintendo.co.jp/ir/pdf/2023/annual2303e.pdf

Executive pay in the US seems to be high compared to at least Japan. Are US executives really that much better than Japanese executives scored against objective metrics?

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Japanese companies did not do very well over the last 20 years (by pretty much any metric) so objectively US executives as a group did significantly better than Japanese executives as a group. In addition you can't talk only CEO salaries without mentioning that salaries in US are overall much higher than in Japan. 13M salary for somebody managing 305k employees sounds very reasonable when senior manager/director (manages 50 people) at tech company makes 1M+.

Assigning macroeconomic trends to the actions of CEOs seems off. A really good CEO (if that exists) can not fight decades of terrible macro.

Compare it to the past US CEO pay then. In the heyday of the American economic boom of the 1960s, the CEO-to-worker pay gap was an order of magnitude lower. What's a bit odd to me is how the social norms have shifted regarding this, to the point where average Americans defend it as just.

Did you adjust for company size? I bet the average s&p 500 company is much larger than they were in the 60s. Doesn't seem strange or unjust to me that a ceo of a $1 trillion market cap company can demand higher pay than one for a $1 billion company.

> Did you adjust for company size? I bet the average s&p 500 company is much larger than they were in the 60s.

If you adjust for company size then you should adjust for inflation as well. I’d be interested in knowing for sure, but if I had to, I’d guess they’re 5-10x, not 1000x, bigger.

As another commenter mentioned, there’s a lot that goes into market cap. The adjusted PE is quite a bit higher than the 1960s, implying the market caps are overvalued by comparison, so I’m not sure market cap is a great proxy.

One other way to measure it is by worker productivity, which has also increased since the 1960s. Somehow those productivity gains are disproportionately hoovered up by management.

> Are US executives really that much better than Japanese executives scored against objective metrics?

At negotiation and price discovery, clearly they are :)

US execs seem to be really good at using company money to provide back-scratching favors to board members. Maybe they're less-good at that in other countries, so boards don't reward them as well.

US developer pay is easily 2-3x that of our Western European counterparts. The gap widens tremendously as you move further East in Europe and especially into the middle east, Asia and SE Asia. But you get American developers (myself included) coming out of the woodwork to defend that.

Comparing the President of a Japanese video game company to the CEO of major American healthcare organization with ~6-7x the revenue isn't really an apt comparison, is it?

> Comparing the President of a Japanese video game company to the CEO of major American healthcare organization with ~6-7x the revenue isn't really an apt comparison, is it?

Why wouldn’t it be? And if it’s not, how about a comparison between Sony and KP? Sony’s revenue in 2022 was $88B (though with a much larger net of $6.7B instead of KP’s $0.9B). Sony’s CEO was paid $4.4M.

https://www.sony.com/en/SonyInfo/IR/library/FY2022_20F_PDF.p...

I also think spinning Nintendo as simply a Japanese video game company undersells their global presence as well as the fact that they build hardware in addition to software. My guess is that Nintendo or Sony have a much greater global presence than KP though I certainly could be wrong.

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