They could all take massive pay cuts to preserve jobs. They have agency and they have chosen to enrich their stock price at the expense of people’s lives and well being.
Contrary to popular belief, at a company the size of MSFT - the execs could drop all their wages to $0 - and it would not be able to save 5% of the workforce from getting fired.
The execs get paid a lot - but there's not that many of them, and there's 200k people at MSFT making an average salary (with benefits) >$200k. That's >$40B per year. The execs don't take home >$2B per year.
Satya made <$60M last year. There's not 35 execs at MSFT making the same amount of money or higher. There's 18 others, and they make a lot less money on average.
MS c-suite makes a total of roughly ~$135,244,086, the board of directors make a total of about $4m (gates takes no salary at all, btw).
This 10k layoff, at an average salary of 190,302, is about $2b a year. So yeah not quite - but for them to suffer no consequences is still pretty gross.
Worse thing is that MSFT minted $72B in net income last year, so these layoffs are really about them saving...2.7% of net income in exchange for messing with the lives of 10k employees.
I just saw a headline yesterday based on a new study which said the average U.S. CEO's compensation is 399 times the average employee. So there's your number. A CEO taking zero would cover less than 400 employees. Also, keep in mind the vast majority of Satya's compensation is in long-term vesting stock options which can become worthless if the stock is lower in four years than it is this year. Also, due to how capital gains taxes work, Satya is going to hold his vested options for at least another year after they vest.
Plus, every sale of the company's stock by a key executive is immediately reported to the SEC and publicly available on the SEC and company's websites. Wall street watches this like a hawk. If any key exec unloads more than a few percent of their entire holdings at any one time, it will hurt the stock price pretty substantially. Effectively, it makes it so the CEO can't sell a lot their stock at once while they are CEO.
The big numbers you see for CEO compensation for this year are largely stock options that were granted years prior which vested this year. Almost all of Satya's compensation is performance-based instead of guaranteed. The company he leads must deliver sustained profitable growth over the long-term for his comp to be worth a lot. The fact it's worth a lot this year is almost entirely due to him already delivering on his commitments to shareholders in the past. Keep in mind that the average public company CEO is in the CEO job less than five years. Satya is in the minority that is succeeding. Due to the high visibility of the CEO role, the majority who don't succeed have a high likelihood of never earning significant compensation again.
Why make a profit when you can pay your employees >100% of your revenue and just go into debt instead?
It's not how business works.
You hire people if you need people, and you pay them the least you can get away with, so you maximize profits - because long ago, you raised money with the promise to the people you raised the money from that you would do this, and you have a Fiduciary obligation to do so...
That is what a lot of employees do. That is why these layoffs are probably happening, cutting 5% could have been done by freezing hiring and performance evals.
They're particular individuals who will take a stance like what you're outlining and sit in a limbo state outside of performance firing them. They bring down team moral, high performing employees feel cheated, etc.
I think it would be more accurate to say it exposes to the high performers that they are being cheated. Those employees are donating their time & effort to the company so that their bosses can drive fancy cars, fund yacht racing teams, take tourist trips to LEO, buy social media companies to use as toys, and pay off politicians to keep those same employees desperate. The owners want employees fighting amongst themselves for scraps because it keeps them distracted from their real enemy.
Long ago capitalism and then neoliberalism infected our brains. There’s no rational reason why any of these promises were made in the first place while still having people without health care or a home.
The execs get paid a lot - but there's not that many of them, and there's 200k people at MSFT making an average salary (with benefits) >$200k. That's >$40B per year. The execs don't take home >$2B per year.
Satya made <$60M last year. There's not 35 execs at MSFT making the same amount of money or higher. There's 18 others, and they make a lot less money on average.