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Comment by waitforit | Hacker News Reader

Many people complain about that number (not necessarily on hackernews, but there are some comments like that already) without realizing that most of that value is based on the stock price and not cash. Depending on how the IPO fares this $193M value can turn into $1M or $1B+ (both extremes and very unlikely to happen).

He got around $1.1M in cash.

> According to an SEC filing, Huffman got a salary of $341,346 in 2023 and a $792,000 “incentive” bonus. In February, Huffman’s salary was raised to $550,000 with the bulk of his $193 million compensation package tied to stock.

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The same applies to all public company CEOs. They all get paid mostly in stock.

Ultimately it's the other shareholders paying these compensation packages. They may sometimes be well deserved, but discussing and criticizing them is fair too.

Sometimes courts do strike down excesses. Elon Musk's $55 billion package was voided by a Delaware court because the Tesla board didn't follow proper procedure. (I.e. not because he didn't create shareholder value — he absolutely did! — but because the process was flawed.)

Stock compensation is arguably way more valuable than cash compensation unless you're leading a sinking ship, taxation is much better and you get more power/votes in the company.

I'm sure the most active mods would be happy to have shares worth only a mere few hundred thousand dollars?

Regardless of the amount it's a particularly egregious example of profiting from other people's hard work.

But when the victims are willing and enthusiastic participants, who would complain bitterly if they were barred from contributing their free labor, what are you supposed to do?

Their free labor is compensated by something else, probably status or power, obviously, so it's not clear that anyone is being taken advantage of.

This common argument seems like a misunderstanding of how Reddit works. Mods aren't unpaid workers for Reddit, but rather, mods get access to a free platform to create a community on the condition that it follows the rules. That's the compensation. In contrast, one of the forums I'm active on just did a donation run to keep their servers running for another year.

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