I wish we could all be mature enough that such pointless symbolic gestures were not necessary. This causes no hardship for Tim and makes no non-negligible impact on Apple's financials or employee wellbeing
Isn’t it fun to move goalposts! On layoff threads, people comment that the CEOs “taking full responsibility” should cut exec pay. Now we have a company that hasn’t had any layoffs and the CEO is taking a paycut and it’s a pointless symbolic gesture.
The goalpost comment really isn't necessary; there are a lot of people on this site, and it's inevitable that conflicting opinions will get expressed. I think there's an interesting point to be made about how widely differing expectations can make it difficult for public figures to avoid criticism from one group or another, but it's muddled by the dubious assumption that people commenting on articles are some monolithic unit rather than a varying set of individuals from one article to the next, each of whom have potentially unique perspectives and aren't necessarily the same people who commented on a different thread.
This isn't a PR exercise. Context is needed as below:
1. Shareholders have a "say-on-pay" vote, this is non-binding, but gives the board an idea of shareholder attitudes.
2. Institutional Shareholder Services raised concerns with their clients about Tim Cook's pay and requested that they vote against Tim's proposed package.
3. The approval vote dropped to 64% (usually around 95%).
4. Members of the compensation team engaged shareholders for an idea about where to set compensation. Tim then requested that.
I don’t think those two are remotely related to each other. You could drain the wealth of the top 1000 people to zero and still not support a social safety net in perpetuity.
To put some numbers behind it, the 735 billionaires in the world are worth $4.7 trillion total. Spread evenly across only 300 million people that’s only $15.6k each. Then that money is all gone.
First, a safety net wouldn't apply to 300 million people, only a small percentage of that who need it when it's necessary. Second, I'm not suggesting it is solely funded by taxing the megarich.
Other nations already offer healthcare. This isn't mathematically infeasible, it's been done elsewhere, and done for years.
I laugh at these companies laying off random people instead of cleaning up execs/managers, they treat their workforce like livestock, no wonder they are showing poor results lately
Consider the growing list of CEO who have "taken full responsibility" for layoffs without taking on any of the downside. Even on a symbolic level this is the right thing to do, but practically speaking it signals some sense of skin in the game which is sadly lacking from CEO's who let go of staff without acknowledging that it was a failure of their management in any material terms.
It's insulting to say that someone giving up a potential income amount that I will never achieve cumulatively in my entire lifetime is symbolic and pointless.
symbolic gestures constitute a large part of the fabric of society. Saying "thank you" to someone doesn't provide any value, yet you do it, and people appreciate it.
By that logic he should have just kept is salary what it was. His salary now is about .05% of the companies revenue. That would be like the CEO of Mailchimp making 350k