1 yr. ago • 96%

Microsoft CEO Nadella's compensation drops... to $48M — CEO to employee pay ratio hits 250 to 1

www.theregister.com Microsoft CEO Nadella's compensation drops... to $48M

Try to hold back your tears as CEO to employee pay ratio hits: 250 to 1

Microsoft CEO Nadella's compensation drops... to $48M — CEO to employee pay ratio hits 250 to 1::Try to hold back your tears as CEO to employee pay ratio hits: 250 to 1

37 comments

I'd support laws that limited CEO:Employee wage ratio to something more like 10:1.

If you pay me 100k and you're making 1m, I can accept that there is no room for a raise or a bonus.

If you are making 10m and I am making 100k and you deny me a raise, I'm feeling disenfranchised.

172
- I'd like to see such a rule, but doubt that there won't be any loopholes to circumvent it. You can already see some of those in sports. There are a lot of stories on how clubs "dealt" with financial fair play in european football and I heard rumors of a similar thing with the american salary cap too.
  
  Just some ideas:
  
  ridiculously long contracts with "fair" pay
  
  managers are working for a seperate company that only contains managers
  
  seperate overpayed contracts for a none existing job
  
  material/service based rewards like private jets
  
  All in all good luck with finding a politician pushing this through (most lf the are exactly in those positions) and finding all the loopholes. Rich people can pay a lot of experts to become even richer
  
  27
  
  There will always be loop holes, but then you fix those. And regardless, loop holes are not used by all, and they take time to find. So that’s no reason not to do it.
  
  19
  
  All you have to do is have a subsidiary corporation that the executives work for. They get paid whatever insane amount and the parent company hires the executive company so it's not direct payroll. I've seen this exact arrangement done for other tax reasons.
  
  6
  
  Those are only loopholes if they are allowed to exist. If people do those things, but then get fined/persecuted as they are infringing on the spirit of the law to limit executive/worker pay ratio, then they are not loopholes right?
  
  2
- It's better to place the burden on the company as a whole per revenue than per CEO pay differential. Amazon for example made somewhere in the 500 billion dollars in revenue for 2022 but for all ~1.5m employees only spent ~42 billion on salaries for an average of ~28k a year.
  
  They have so much ample revenue to use for increased salaries that goes unanswered.
  
  17
  
  Won't work, can't work.
  
  There are companies which have insane revenues but tiny profits - let's say manufacturing, where you need to pay a shitton for materials and workers, just to get a bit in return.
  
  There are also companies where the main source of income is selling people's time, say a consulting firm like McKinsey. Their income/revenue ratio is gonna be totally different from the first example.
  
  I'm sure there are good ways to do it but this ain't one of them.
  
  15
- Do you live in Europe? Then do consider signing the commission for the EU commission https://www.tax-the-rich.eu/
  
  11
- This. So this. I've been saying the same for years, if not decades. The highest salary in a company should never be allowed to pass the lowest by a factor of 10.
  
  Also, companies should be limited to 1000 employees and an x amount of value.
  
  Companies should become less influential
  
  9
Guess he has only been working 250x as hard as the other employees

60
- Permanently Deleted
  
  2
- I closely work with the CEO at my organization and their whole job is decision making. If you have common sense then you can be a CEO
  
  -1
- unironically I do think that the ceo of a corporation as big as Microsoft does much greater than 250x the work as a low level employee. Not in terms of hours spent, but in terms of skill required and impact.
  
  -11
  
  Bullshit, so many things incorrect and nonsensical about what you just said.
  
  8
OH NO! However will Mr. CEO survive on checks notes $48,000,000 annually. It's almost cruel to expect him to live on such a paltry figure.

Those cruel shareholders have no heart

/s in case it's not obvious

39
That’s still an obscene amount of money, but I appreciate the trend reversal.

26
- It's not reversing. He didn't hit the right metrics to get the 50M he could be getting. He just didn't get his bonuses.
  
  He also froze employee wages a few months ago, thanks to inflation, if anything, it's set up to accelerate to get even worse.
  
  47
I hope he can financially recover from this

20
The CEO is an employee.

If I make ten times the minimum wage, am I working ten times as hard as a minimum wage earner?

15
- Not harder, but it’s also a matter of knowledge. You couldn’t take any person off the street and have them be a successful CEO tomorrow. Same with other specialized roles, like medical roles, some IT areas, rocketry, etc.
  
  That said, pay and benefits disparity is a real thing and I’d love to see it addressed. But what is reasonable to me may not be to others.
  
  15
  
  You couldn’t take any person off the street and have them be a successful CEO tomorrow.
  
  Are you sure? Has anyone ever tried? Maybe we should do an experiment!
  
  11
Nice hoodie Satya, bet it cost more than my annual salary.

10
Honestly this fixation on CEO salary is a bit silly, most of them are getting rich from stock, not salary.

5
- it is total compensation. His salary was "only" 2.5 million.
  
  15
I'm really confused are they saying the median or mean salary is 200k?

2
- All benefits included that’s likely to be true. A starting software engineer job out of college hits over 100k$ in salary alone. It’s probably offset by administrative roles, but still you can get past 500k$ with ten to twenty years of experience. Not unheard that top employees will have compensations in the million.
  
  3
  
  But is it the mean salary is 200k or the median because it can't be the lowest and usually the two are very far apart.
  
  1

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