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by rsanek 557 days ago
$50m yearly salary is limited upside? interesting take
3 comments

> $50m yearly salary is limited upside? interesting take

OK. Rule of thumb. Any sensationalist headline about CEO making $N dollars is always wrong.

The real details are in the Proxy statement they are now required to file. As an example, when Pat signed on, his compensation package was worth over $160m. How much did he actually get? $10M. Why? Because the rest of the package was contingent on high share prices (I think $80 was the lowest target). He got none of it.

And the punchline: His total payout during his whole tenure is $46-49M. That's over almost 4 years. And includes his sign on bonus and severance bonus.

So yes, your claim of $50m yearly salary is ludicrous.

https://finance.yahoo.com/news/pat-gelsinger-lost-massive-14...

Incredible that they set his performance targets on stock price and not on market share and technological superiority.

Priorities and incentives matter

That’s a lot of money to you and me, but we’re not in the running for a CEO position at Intel. For the people who might be, I wouldn’t be surprised if that’s peanuts.
It's also, weirdly, not going to make a lot of difference to the person earning it.

If you're next in line to that, you can already afford literally everything. Or stop working tomorrow and still afford _almost_ everything.

So it's about whether or not it's a good job to work in, and one that will enhance your reputation and status.

IIRC 10 year old report states 100 million usd net worth is enough to buy whatever you want.
Depends on your appetite of course. But I think it's safe to say that if you're not satisfied at $10m net worth, you're never going to be, and you'll just keep on chasing til circumstances force you to stop.
50M in salary is actually quite high. The S&P 500 average is less than 20M. I’ve seen companies half the size of Intel pay their CEOs ~11M.
It is high. And it is wrong. See details here:

https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42341514

When you can get fired by the board within 6 months, it matters. This could be a death blow gig for a competent career CEO.