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Comment by nostrademons | Hacker News Reader

It’s entirely possible that this is causal ABs deliberate, ie the reason why boards of these companies have approved large CEO pay packages is so that the CEO will align themselves with the shareholders paying them rather than the workers working for them and cut wages so the money can be returned to shareholders as buybacks.

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There's no plan. CEO salaries have just crept up steadily.

If anything, they're paying CEOs so much in some cases that the rational thing for the CEO to do is as little work as possible. Why work hard if you'll get enough to retire comfortably on regardless of your performance?

> Why work hard if you'll get enough to retire comfortably on regardless of your performance?

... Sundar Pichai, is that you?

After the Pixel announcement (Jimmy Fallon? Cringe) recently and the bafflingly bad fumble with LLMs, I’m surprised people think he works at all.

Now the question is how the efficient market hypothesis plays out here in the long term. Counterexamples like Costco exist and are doing extremely well, when and how do their asset prices reflect this?

Do you have an iPhone? Mine is constantly turning “and” into “ABs” when I type with swipe.

I've noticed too. Idk what it is about iOS's autocorrect that has made it go to absolute shit over the last few years.

Android's too. For some reason, it randomly changes plurals into possessives by adding apostrophes from time to time with no rule I can infer and avoid, but often enough to be annoying.

weird, I'm running into this with IOS 26 beta as well

Yes, posted that from an iPhone. Didn't even notice the typo at the time.

The iPhone swipe keyboard is crap. I have much better luck with GBoard, but then I have to install GBoard, and have all sorts of issues with app unresponsiveness or crashes whenever either GBoard or iPhone updates.

Google up "CEO fiduciary duty" - that's very much within the definition of a CEO role.

Yeah pretty much.. but this is a good thing. Companies should focus on improving profits and not wages.

Yes, crush the bottom 99.9% under the jackboots of the 0.1% even harder! That's what we need!

Are there studies that show a causal relationship between higher CEO pay and profits?

Do buybacks cause profits to increase? Maybe from what I can see? But long-term? If all we care about is short-term then that will lead to the continued financial cannibalization of the US economy. Where private equity firms buy companies and destroy them for short-term profit while loading them with the debt used to buy them.

I think the obvious answer to both these questions is: no. CEO pay and buybacks don't focus on profits. At best short-term. Which isn't good.

I think companies should focus on making good products that positively serve the countries they sell in, while secondly still aiming for a profit.

If you measure 'profit' as 'how much does the net worth of our owners go up', stock buybacks make a lot of sense.

This seems like a particularly terrible measure of success for everyone but those owners.

This is too circular. Profit is just revenue - cost. The stock values depend on current and future risk adjusted profit.

In theory. In practice the stock prices of many large companies seems to be completely decoupled from any thing even resembling economic reality.

Does anyone really think Tesla is worth more than every single other automaker combined? That’s what the stock price (market cap) is saying.

Why do you think the shareholders approve the CEO salaries if they don't get back profits in return? You can't have the short term long term argument because stock values already account for risk adjusted returns over time.

If as you said, short term profits are prioritised over long term profits - the short term stock price would reflect that and it is not beneficial to shareholders.

You don't think CEOs have gamed the compensation committees?

I think the major institutional investors don't get involved cuz they're major institutional investors, and other investors don't have enough power to influence the compensation committee.

Yeah but why does the board approve those salaries if they don't expect to get more out of it?

What makes you think a typical corporate board actually acts in the interest of its shareholders?

??? Because the typical corporate board usually owns an awful lot of shares, and the c-suite is often largely paid in shares. The second part of this article is about stock buybacks for a reason. There is really no doubt that they are sensitive to shareholders here.

Go check out how the Tesla board functions, who is on it, how they got there, and how they could be removed.

Musk has his cronies on the board, and the rules to replace someone on the board effectively require 80+% of the stock not owned by Elon to change.

The members of this board got huge stock grants from Musk and are utterly beholden to him.

> Do buybacks cause profits to increase?

They cause each (remaining) shareholder's part of the profits to increase (relative and absolute), because there are fewer shareholders left. So it does very really increase the value of each share.

Wages are not set by a company, they're set by the supply and demand of the market. Adding a minimum wage just criminalizes hiring anyone who is not productive enough to economically justify the minimum. It hurts unskilled poor people the most.

Minimum wage is supposed to represent the minimum wage necessary for a worker to meet their basic human needs.

If you don't have a minimum wage, some people get paid below this level, and they somehow struggle along in poverty. But there is no real incentive for the state to help them.

Establish a minimum wage. Now these people are unemployed. Which contributes to the unemployment percentage. Causes the government to lose votes. The state has to pay out unemployment benefits to these people. The govt+state now have real incentives to change the structure of economy to ensure jobs are created for these people that are productive enough to justify the minimum wage.

But available labor is available labor, for new businesses.

I don't understand why people sit around saying oh the minimum wage is going to increase unemployment and therefore treat minimum wage legislation as apostasy, but some radical new technology which results in a lot of unemployment is just the economy getting more efficient and it will absorb all the excess labor with new enterprises.

Is there something about minimum wage legislation that makes the labor completely unusable? Wouldn't it be equally as temporary as some large efficiency gain in the economy?

If people are working full time yet still in poverty, they will need government services like food stamps. In this scenario your tax dollars subsidize businesses that pay poverty wages. Wal Mart is the top employer of SNAP and Medicaid recipients. You would rather subsidize Wal Mart’s margins with your tax dollars?

I think the role of government is limited to that of protecting constitutional rights of citizens. People in impoverished countries live with extended family and share income and get along just fine. We shouldn't violate rights of individuals to facilitate a welfare program. That should be handled by families, communities, religious institutions, etc.

That is your opinion. The role of government should be whatever the citizens decide through democratic processes. If they want the government to go around feeding people from milk bottles, that is what it will be. If they decide it is to run the fight club that decides who eats and who dies, that will be its role. Americans have decided that the role of government is going to be closer to the second than the first, as is their right. Other countries lie in a different points in the continuum, but they are not any more wrong.

Yeah it's the opinion of the western world. "We hold these truths to be self evident" is the preamble.

These truths are not self evident to other cultures. Like yours

What Western world? European countries have decent social safety nets administered by the government.

They're just trolling. This is far too silly a line of argument to treat seriously.

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