McDonald's CEO Steve Easterbrook gets a 368% pay raise

[Elixer]

So how much should POTUS make?

POTUS makes much more than a billion, if you figure in all the $$$ getting that person there...

 

[sdifox]

POTUS makes much more than a billion, if you figure in all the $$$ getting that person there...

But it is a 19 trillion dollar company!

 

[OutHouse]

a 'whopping' $7.9 million?

That actually seems rather low for running such a large multinational

Meanwhile Kaepernick is going to be paid over $12 million to sit on the bench . . .

yea i was expecting something like 100 mill or someithing. 7.9 for one of the worlds largest companies does seem like he is getting fucked over.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

Unless the CEO also has controlling interest in the company (in which case they get most of the profit anyway) why would the board want to pay so much more for so much worse results?

Because CEOs are a special club; they're all on each others' boards; approving incrementally higher salaries, bonuses, and severance packages for each other every year. And their heads are so far up their own asses (collectively) that most of them are convinced they're actually worth it.

(Board members, by the way, get paid hundreds of thousands of dollars worth of cash and/or stock to go to a few meetings a year and occasionally think about stuff. Positions on a board can also be political gifts or publicity stunts, like Al Gore's spot on the Apple BoD. Which is easy to do if a few people have a majority of the voting shares, and vote not to allow other shareholders to vote.)

People get up in arms about the pay difference between CEOs and line workers, like that's meaningful. I don't care about that so much - what makes it obvious to me that something is rotten, is that a CEO today makes eleventy* times as much as they did decades ago.

Is the job that much harder? No, otherwise the oldsters couldn't keep up. Are the companies more profitable? Yes, but not that much. Is there a shortage of qualified CEOs? Probably not - at the very least, any Division VP or CTO/CIO/CFO is qualified to step into that job - as one will do temporarily if the CEO gets fired or resigns.

And none of them can justify it, except to throw buzzword diarrhea at you about how great they are, how they have vision and leaderships skills, and how almost nobody could do their job. Which is usually demonstrably bullshit.

*(Not the actual number. But it's a bunch. Read link if interested.)

 

[HamburgerBoy]

^ I love it when someone spends a lot of time writing a big-ass article and then manages to destroy their own argument so easily:

Over the entire period from 1978 to 2013, CEO compensation increased about 937 percent, a rise more than double stock market growth and substantially greater than the painfully slow 10.2 percent growth in a typical worker’s compensation over the same period. If we had included Facebook in our sample then CEO compensation would have risen 1,596 percent from 1978 to 2013.

Who is the CEO of Facebook? Hint: he wasn't the member of any "Good Old Boys" club. When they limit things to only the top 350 CEOs in America, obviously things are skewed. We have more self-made billionaires now than ever before, and those people generally retain control of their companies for a while.

 

[Elixer]

But it is a 19 trillion dollar company!

With a 21 trillion debt, so, they should obviously fire the CEO!

 

[Ichinisan]

Yeah this whole capitalist thing makes me sick. There is zero redistribution of wealth. In fact he probably laid off people to get that bonus. Typical thing that seems to happen all too much now at all companies.

I would not be able to live with myself if I made that much money and had employees living on poverty. But I guess it takes a cold hearted person to be a CEO these days. You don't make decisions based on your heart, but based on money, and nothing but that.

 

[GagHalfrunt]

Even so, this never plays out well. Bad time to cash in his raise when there's all this striking going on.

Nope, perfect time for a new CEO to lay the smackdown on the whiny fucks and replace them with kiosks. Show them that their job isn't even worth the minimum wage they're getting. Profits rise and he justifies his salary.

 

[dave_the_nerd]

^ I love it when someone spends a lot of time writing a big-ass article and then manages to destroy their own argument so easily:



Who is the CEO of Facebook? Hint: he wasn't the member of any "Good Old Boys" club. When they limit things to only the top 350 CEOs in America, obviously things are skewed. We have more self-made billionaires now than ever before, and those people generally retain control of their companies for a while.

Companies still run by their founders are obviously not typical, or particularly relevant, since they've never actually hired a CEO.

I figured that would be painfully obvious but I guess I gave you too much credit. My bad.

I'm not sure why you bring up billionaires - most CEOs aren't even close.

As for "self-made billionaires" - how many of those are there? Are we talking about, like, 20 when we used to have 10? Because there's only like a thousand billionaires on the entire planet. Vladimir Putin is a self-made billionaire...

 

[HamburgerBoy]

Companies still run by their founders are obviously not typical, or particularly relevant, since they've never actually hired a CEO.

I figured that would be painfully obvious but I guess I gave you too much credit. My bad.

I'm not sure why you bring up billionaires - most CEOs aren't even close.

As for "self-made billionaires" - how many of those are there? Are we talking about, like, 20 when we used to have 10? Because there's only like a thousand billionaires on the entire planet. Vladimir Putin is a self-made billionaire...

How is that not typical? Dell is still run by Michael Dell. Larry Ellison was CEO of Oracle for a long time. Warren Buffett is still CEO of his business. The article you linked was intentionally limited to only the top earning CEOs, obviously because the hundreds of thousands of small local businesses would skew things downwards.

And sure, self-made millionaires are a thing too. I'm saying the "Good Old Boys" thing is an invented conspiracy theory for the most part.