I remember hearing Matt Damon protest that CEOs made 100x more than their lowest paid workers. I did some quick math based on production crew salaries and at $20m (plus residuals) per movie he was making around 800x the lowest paid FTEs, even those in a union.
Football players and pop stars get their own share of grief (remember the song "Money for Nothin'"?). Probably more than an appropriate 1/33 as much grief.
Because not everyone can be a professional football player or entertainer. Anyone can be a decision maker be it good or bad. Also, a football player or entertainer can also be a CEO. A great example of this is Beats By Dre, with Dr Dre being a CEO coupled with also being a major celebrity and selling the company he help found to Apple for 3 billion. We also have examples of athletes like Rob Dyrdek becoming a celebrity. Rarely do we see the inverse (e.g. shark tank with Cuban, Musk)
Is it fair that Joan shows up to work everyday at the Amazon warehouse busting her back, while Jeff works from his private plane making more money in few hours than Joan will ever see in a lifetime? That's what amazes me...
I can't speak to other countries, but in the US, politicians are not especially well paid. The President makes $400k; Senators and representatives get $174k. Top GS scale employees make $144k.
It's certainly nothing to sneeze at, but many of them were making more before they went into politics. And most of them have to maintain two homes, one in DC and another in their district. It's a small multiple of US average worker salary, but less than one order of magnitude (except for the President, who makes as much as ~12 average Americans).
Most are rich, but they were rich before. It's expensive to go into politics. It's not impossible to get into Congress without being rich, but most are.
Yea no. What politicians make on paper is a moot point. There's a reason they all listen to the special interests and lobbyists and not their constituents.
Then there's the regulatory capture of being a politician then going to work for the companies that lobbied them.
These guys earn it. If I pay for a concert of I pay for a game I know I'm contributing to that celebrities salary because that person is responsible for a huge portion of the entertainment. I do so willingly.
When I pay for a product I want the majority of my payment to go to the workers responsible for realizing the product not the CEO telling the workers what to do. We all know a company is destroyed if you remove all the workers, but not if you remove a CEO. The same cannot be said of celebrities.
Additionally I'm a fucking worker as are most people here. So of course it's a problem for me if the CEO is taking something that isnt considered a fair share by workers. I'm also 100 percent fucking aware of what my CEO actually does and how much he actually contributes.
What amazes me is the leaps of logic that CEOs formulate in order to justify their crimes and lie to themselves.
A concert also falls apart without stage crew, yet we still accept that the star in the light gets 20000 times their hourly pay. And while “Spice girls” would certainly be different if they’d chosen a different cast of girls for the positions, I highly doubt it would have been fundamentally different[0] Yet Amazon would not be here today without Bezos, Facebook would not be here without Zuckerberg and Apple wouldn’t be here without Jobs. I think it’s quite narrow minded and unfair to discard their contributions off-hand simply because you feel like 100% of the money you pay for an iPhone should go to the worker that pushed the button on the assembly line that put it together, or the person sorting the package into the right bin before the robots at Amazon sort those into the shipping box that eventually ends up at your door, so you can use it to like the latest SoMe posts from your favorite boy/girl-band.
[0]I’m not trying to put down their musical or performance talent, just commenting on the fact that even the greatest entertainment products are still just entertainment products and certainly don’t justify a huge x compared to CEO’s just because one song is more popular than another.
> I think it’s quite narrow minded and unfair to discard their contributions off-hand simply because you feel like 100% of the money you pay for an iPhone should go to the worker that pushed the button on the assembly line that put it together
I think it's quite narrow minded and downright evil to paint a picture as if this is what I'm doing.
I NEVER said the CEO doesn't matter. But certainly he doesn't matter as much as you and their salaries imply. Jobs died, guess what happened to Apple? Nothing. Steve jobs matters, but along with every other CEO in the world, if he suddenly dies, life goes on and not much happens to the company.
Additionally what the hell is this garbage about assembly workers pushing buttons? That's just one step in a highly complex process. There's designers, engineers, programmers and assembly workers. All of these people combined contribute far more than Steve Jobs saying, "build me a touch screen phone." Certainly you need someone to give the order but in no way is this person a critical part of the equation. You saying this is a deliberate distortion of what I am saying. The best word to describe it is: lies.
>[0]I’m not trying to put down their musical or performance talent, just commenting on the fact that even the greatest entertainment products are still just entertainment products and certainly don’t justify a huge x compared to CEO’s just because one song is more popular than another.
Yeah great job covering your ass while distorting and twisting my point. No dude. CEO's as they stand today deserve far less than celebrities. The entire operation falls apart without a celebrity. Not so for the CEO.
CEOs are an important part the equation for a product. But they are also the least important when compared to the rest of pipeline. The CEO is replaceable, the pipeline is not.
Football players destroy their bodies for 2-4 years (average career length) of ~$860,000/year (median NFL salary). Be angry at football team owners instead.