Too long for Twitter, so it’s going here: stop complaining
about top level executives getting a ton of money, ESPECIALLY CEOs and
CFOs. Even with government bailout money, as far as I know the
government is NOT suspending Sarbanes-Oxley, so the CEO and CFO are
still under great stress to keep their company clean.
Being paid multiples of millions of dollars when managing a
multi-billion dollar company is completely appropriate. The market
respects it, employees respect it, and VCs respect it. When your name
goes on your financial reports as CEO and there’s the possibility that
your CFO is doing unethical things behind your back, it’s over. Do not
pass go, do not collect $200. CEO goes to jail, potentially for doing
nothing, and is unable to provide for his family (which hopefully isn’t
an issue) and keep the social aspect of his/her life together. Taking a risk like this is HUGE, and is another small part of justifying the large sums high level executives are paid.
Go ahead and fight, but I’m staying firm on this. There are
always situations where this won’t hold, and I’m sure they’ll come up.
But overall, I think it’s completely justifiable that the CEO of large,
publicly-traded companies be compensated appropriately.
Yer nutz! You seriously believe that employees respect that kind of disparity! Even shareholders are not in support of this disparity. The only reason they get away with this crap is because most CEO compensation (even after S-Oxley) is hidden from shareholders in various ways). You can’t really believe that Steve Jobs works for $1 a year … if you do you’re NUTZ!
We all know Steve doesn’t make $1 a year. It’s probably closer to $10 Million. But Steve built the business up, it’s his brainchild, and his shareholders clearly believe that he needs to be compensated in that way in order to keep pumping out products like he does.As I said, there are always situations where it won’t hold, but I think that it gets blown out of proportion. CEOs either do their job, or the BOD/VCs/Shareholders get them out of there. Find me a CEO of a Fortune 500 company, or even a startup like mine, that doesn’t work 80+ hours a week and we can have a discussion about whether or not they’re creating value warranting their salaries or not.