CEOs got hefty pay raises in 2023, widening gap with the workers they oversee | Hacker News Reader

CEOs got hefty pay raises in 2023, widening gap with the workers they oversee

abcnews.go.com

64 pointspaulpauper21 comments

The gap is only part of the problem.

I think the bigger issue is that CEOs will lay off employees to save $10M/year on wages, and the board will reward them with a $10M bonus.

It's not theft, but I feel like it's theft.

> I think the bigger issue is that CEOs will lay off employees to save $10M/year on wages...

... and often spend another $5M in layoff expenses and severance...

Can you give an example of where that happened?

Alphabet, Meta, Microsoft, Uber, Salesforce are some recent-ish examples

https://abcnews.go.com/Business/ceos-pay-climbed-layoffs-tec...

It's the ultimate case of "Some of you may die, but that is a sacrifice I am willing to make."

Those are examples of layoffs in general, but the objectionable thing about OPs scenario is a layoff followed by an increase in the CEO or executive pay of around the same amount of value as was cut. I would expect CEO pay increases to cost less much less than a large layoff like these.

> Alphabet CEO Sundar Pichai was awarded compensation worth more than $225 million in 2022, which marked a staggering 3,474% increase from the previous year, making him the nation's highest-paid CEO, according to Equilar data.

If I did the math right, the increase was $218,500,000 and they laid off 12,000 workers (higher than the 10k predicted in the article) so the pay increase was about $18,200 per worker laid off. That's just the CEO, so unknown if other executive also received increases. Perhaps that's within your acceptable range, I'm not sure

I find it absolutely reprehensible to give a raise of any kind to the C-Suite while doing massive layoffs.

If there's a massive amount of overhiring happening, then the CEO takes responsibility for that. It doesn't make sense to give a raise to someone doing a poor job.

When economists say that cutting wages boosts employment they seemingly forget that CEOs never cut their own wages and instead cut the wages of workers with the highest marginal utility for money.

You left off the bit where they have a pay freeze for all the remaining employees* to "keep control of costs"

* excluding c-suite employees who have recieved a 50% salary increase this year

What part of neotechnofeudalism don't you get ?

This kind of reporting really annoys me. The news is the aggregate. It's the fact that on average the CEO pay went up by more than worker pay. To bring context to this they get a quote from someone, and the quote literally could have been said any year in the last 50 years. You know, unlike previous years, this year boards really want to retain good CEOS. Ok yeah, because we all remember 2018 when a number of boards fired CEOs they thought were doing a great job. Sure, Broadcom is killing it, but are we really going to justify this average by focusing on the 1 guy that like 20x'd his company over the last 15 years?

Note how the article doesn't mention the performance of any CEO at the bottom of the list? Or any CEO whose compensation rose but shareprice fell?

Really we want to see 2 things: How much of executive pay increases are accounted for simply by the stock market moving upwards on average (ie, compensation not correlated with individual CEO performance) and how much of the average is impacted by distributional effects (ie, did Broadcom really just move the whole market on its own). Neither question answered by the article.

If we don’t pay our leaders more, they would have to carpool with us. Not fair!

the american system is setup to increase stock prices, whether ceos have talent or not, being in the middle of this setup can help them justify their own salaries.

Money is the only thing that matters, remember that. Getting the bag is all that matters, so go get the bag!

If you extrapolate this increase out another 40 years, what does C-Suite pay look like?

Get the bag!

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