It sounds like their biggest complaint is that the compensation vests too quickly, which means Tim Cook doesn't have an incentive to set Apple up for long term success. They want the vesting to be longer to incentivize him.
But given that his net worth is already $2B, most of which is Apple stock, it seems like he's already incentivized to set Apple up for long term success, one because he has so much stock, and two because he's clearly not working for the comp, but for the love of the game.
Its making a point about a position it's held for a while; that it closely scrutinizes all its investments, a habit it's had for a while, and one it attributes to it's success relative to the nations small size.
It might be a bit hard to believe, but in reality many passionate employees don't really care about the pay - they genuinely want to build a great product - but they are still paid well because the company looks after the top talent in every possible way.
He says he's giving all of his wealth away when he dies anyway. So I'm guessing he has plans to give it to causes he really thinks are important going forward. I'm pretty sure someone like Tim Cook doesn't need the cash so there must be a reason for the compensation and to be fair Apple's execution has been nothing short of incredible since he took over.
Why does the CRA pension plan even have taxes on it in the first place? It's like taxing a government agency for it's budget that it receives it's tax dollars for.
I can’t find it anymore. I gave it a good 5 searches it seems to all be tax related articles on tax shelters. I think maybe it’s because of how google deprioritizes old content now.
It was from around 2014-2015 if I recall correctly.
How would the people of Norway revolt against their own country's sovereign wealth fund? Norway is a very small country with (I seem to remember) the largest wealth fund in the world due to investments of revenue from the oil industry. I highly doubt people there are going to perceive it as evil based on whether or not it's taking a particular stance on Apple's vesting plan.
They do have a tradition of taking stances on corporate governance as a matter of principle and this looks like that.
Norwegian here, can confirm. We do not see the wealth fund as an evil thing :)
The fund has a policy of being an active investor to improve worker rights, prevent unethical practices and has a ban on investing in certain areas like weapons, oil and gas (due to diversification issues), tobacco etc.
Edit: Just a note, the funds operation is completely transparent and you can follow the actions and read about strategy, what time frames they are looking at when investing (very long) and more on their web page [1].
They are following advice from another company (ISS). I would assume that ISS on the other hand have some policies on how to evaluate these things and what to recommend (random results from Google [1]). While this does not make difference in case of Mr Cook, it might be relevant for less wealthy managers and they likely want to apply similar policies for everybody.
I’m not sure he has enough. If he puts that $2B in a savings account earning the average 0.06% interest, he’d only be getting $100K per month. How can anyone live in so little? And he’d be losing a lot to inflation.
Nobody keeps anything close to that kind of amount in a savings account. They put it into various asset classes that appreciate by a lot more than 0.06%/year.
With current life expectancy and inflation prospects, one would need to live quite modestly or invest these 3M very wisely to retire on such a small amount.
Life expectancy has been decreasing, and you'd keep those 3M invested (bond if not stocks) to fend off inflation.
3M is absolutely a mind-boggling amount. Ok, housing in San Francisco will eat most of that, but the vast majority of people in the world retire on way less than that
> but the vast majority of people in the world retire on way less than that
You’re missing something big here. Most people who retire on way less than that are doing so at retirement age.
For example, let’s assume death at 78. The money required to retire at 30 needs to last 48 years. The money required to retire at 65 only needs to last 13 years. And that’s not even taking into account that social security is only available at normal retirement age and you wouldn’t be contributing to it by retiring early.
$3 million is not going to be a secure retirement. It’s going to be very modest living subject to ruin by either inflation (if you go the bond route) or depressions (if you go the stock route).
Two points: In the context of the upthread wager, as a California employee, you’d be left with just under $1.5M if you worked for one year and paid your taxes. No way does that provide $10K/month for possibly 70 years.
Even if you somehow got it entirely tax-free and had no living expenses such that you could start with a $3M balance after a year of work, I’d wager that the vast majority of people would choose to work at least 2 years and many would choose to work 4 or 5 years and that only a small minority of them would quit after 1 year.
Wouldn’t you rather work 2 years and live on $20K/mo rather than just 1 and live on $10K/mo?
Most tech workers in the Bay Area spend $80k/year on housing and commuting expenses, easily. Rents of $5k/mo and mortgage payments (piti) of $7k or more can easily account for almost all of that.
The average tech worker family income in the US is well past 50k. Looking at how poor the savings rate is, I would suspect they are spending a lot more than 80k.
In many parts of the world you can live luxuriously for decades with $3M in assets.
It feels wrong to call what 99% of the world population can never expect to save, a "small amount".
Sure - if you want to live below the poverty level.
I mean, some people live below the poverty level just fine. Power to you if you can.
But $300k will only allow you to indefinitely draw down $12k per year / $1k per month. Considering health insurance is mandatory and costs $4k+ per year - that's not leaving you much.
This is all true if you have no imagination. I have also lived below poverty level so I know how to do it without being worried and stressed out. Having your entire day to do what you want is priceless. I would be living out of a garden, so no need for health insurance.
When you have your time to yourself you can pursue helping people, which builds community and unquantifiable opportunity and prosperiry around you. I can see how most people these days would have no faith in that since each family lives in a bubble where they don't need or know anyone else because they have enough money to pay through the nose for everything. They get no benefit from the community in that case.
Besides. Having $300k I could invest most of it and buy half a mountain with a decent house and a barn here.
This is a silly take, professional sports people definitely love the game and don't turn down big pay cheques.
If you are world-class at something and people will pay you to do it, why wouldn't you get paid for it? Just because you want to get paid doesn't mean you don't love it.
It is very unlikely that most of Tim Cook's net worth is tied up in Apple. There is no reason for him to hold on to $1B+ of vested stock in a single company (especially not his own) instead of diversifying.
Mmh, you might be surprised how many tech execs are not diversified at all.
First, commitment and single-mindedness, but also it's inefficient to harvest capital gains (and pay tax on it) if you don't have to; you have to make a 20% delta in the stock you exchange for to make up for it.
Those tech execs are founders who own like 40% of their growth-stage company and have limitless upside. Tim Cook owns 0.01% of Apple, and his stock isn't going to see exponential growth no matter how well he performs.
I don’t get how this works. If the fund invested in Russian assets they are probably down a lot in value now. If they liquidate them will Russia allow that money to even leave the country? If these assets are outside Russia I guess it’s straightforward but still they probably lost either a large percentage or the full amount of their Russian investment
If the Norwegian fund is selling it's equity stakes in Russian companies, it's going to expect something in return, and that something is usually money, which the Norwegians have no plans to leave in Russia, as getting out of Russian assets is the whole reason for the divestiture in the first place.
The fund can sell its stake to anyone and accept payment in any currency from any bank in the world. The money doesn't have to come from inside Russia.
I hope they've started doing that, say, a couple of weeks ago. If so, they could have a good chance to liquidate most of their positions and transfer the funds.
-en and -et for genders ... it's quite neat. confer hjaelm (helmet) with helmet in english, and you can see it seems to still show through in modern English, in random spots of course.
I know it's topical at the moment, and hey its good PR to take a stand, but frankly it's a tad inconsistent.
So their argument is that a nuclear super power invaded a country with little to no provocation, so hey let's make a point and disinvest.
So far so good. Definitely a good position to take, and one I agree with. Then again Iraqis are wondering why they are still invested in Apple, a US company...
They toppled what they had to during WW II and have had the occupying army there to this day making sure that they don't have to topple anything for the forseeable future.
It's not entirely clear that that's Putin's intention either. It may well be to install a friendly pro-russian government. In which case the US in Iraq starts to look not-so-different. I don't think either is remotely justifiable.
I’ve heard a lot of people suggesting that Putin won’t try to occupy Ukraine, but instead turn it into a satellite state ala Belarus. Is that any better? Probably not. But I’m not convinced what the US and UK have done in Iraq is any better either.
That's what the US war machine wants peasants to believe (or maybe those dumbasses actually believe it themselves, I wouldn't bet against it).
Russia may take the Russian-speaking parts and annex it... but they are run by very smart people, so they are not going to try to annex a territory which has a large population of native-Ukrainian speakers brainwashed against them... which could lead to long never-ending civil war. Not to mention, Ukraine is literally the poorest country in Europe (gdp/capita), so if they annex it, it will be more of a libility than anything even if they could guarantee some form of peace.
They'll try to recreate what they have in Belarus in Ukraine i.e. get rid of the puppet America has installed and install their own.
Everyone criticizing the war in the middle east always seems to casually forget that terrorists from this region hijacked airplanes and destroyed the two tallest buildings in the US with them, killing thousands.
I'm not trying to argue that Saddam Hussein was a nice man... But that's a stretch to still attempt to justify the US invasion of Iraq with 9/11. That's like saying the US should attack Germany because some the 9/11 hijackers lived here and studied here. And France, because "it's in the region". Or bombing Canada because Mexican narco criminals repeatedly murdered US citizens and Canada happens to be in the region (and supports narco terrorism by buying some of the drugs).
Most of the 9/11 attackers were Saudi nationals, none were Iraqi. The "mastermind", according to US intelligence, was bin Laden, a Saudi national (who was technically stateless after his citizenship was stripped by the Saudis long before 9/11), who resided in Afghanistan and Pakistan (and Sudan and Saudi Arabia before that). The US Senate investigation found that Saddam Hussein and the Iraqi nation had no role in 9/11.
The idea that Cook quits because he doesn’t get a raise somewhat relies on the notion that he can do better elsewhere. Is that true? He’s already at the nation’s wealthiest company.
You don't set the compensation for a job bearing in mind the wealth of the person who is filling that position. That's such an odd perspective.
For example, all other things being equal, would you pay someone working for you less because you found out they were the beneficiary of a large inheritance? I hope not; I hope you would keep paying them equitably according to their performance relative to market, I think?
You’re talking to someone who believes in a maximum income, so yes generational wealth effects your pay expectations. Both up and down: up because you have a higher standard of living, and down because you can choose jobs that don’t pay your “market value” because you like the work. Ask anyone in the non-profit or arts sectors - pay is low and generational wealth is widespread.
If you have millions or billions in the bank, you’re working for reasons other than wealth accumulation. You should be paid a living wage (like everyone) and derive your status and satisfaction from things besides a big number getting slightly bigger.
Obviously we live in a world where markets impact how much you have to pay to retain someone beyond that livable wage threshold - but both tim cook and the “ceo of apple” job are not exactly fungible commodities, so it’s not a healthy balanced market that we should trust to invisibly-hand itself a correct valuation.
You have the arrow of causation pointing the wrong way.
The arts sector has a higher proportion of people with wealth because it doesn't pay very much, not the other way around. i.e. they are the only people with the required educational background who can afford to take those jobs. It's not like the arts organizations are trying to figure out who to employ and say "hmm, if we decide to have low pay, we can recruit a bunch of trust-funders and spouses of investment bankers".
By and large, it doesn't matter what your personal situation is when the market sets pay for a position. The comp package for a staff software engineer in SV is X, and it's not going to be X * 0.5 because the employee has a trust fund or X * 2 because the employee has seventeen children, five of which have expensive medical conditions.
The whole reason that boards have compensation committees is to figure out what the "right" level of executive pay is. It doesn't matter who is in that seat. If Apple decides to pay Tim Cook only $1, then what kind of a signal are they sending to the people who might replace him? Instead the board is going to set reasonable, market pay and if Tim Cook wants to give it all away through philanthropy, or even waive the entire package (i.e. taking all but $1), then that's up to him.
> The arts sector has a higher proportion of people with wealth because it doesn't pay very much, not the other way around
Yes this is obviously true. If the pay is low and you’re poor you’ll go elsewhere if you can. But my point is those rich people stay in that field even tho the pay is low, because they like the work. I suspect most CEOs would stay in their job if you cut all CEO pay by 1/10th, not that doing that would make their job low paid. As long as you did it across the board, instead of just at one company. My evidence for this? In 1985 ceo pay was 30x the average worker. In 2015 it was 271x. That’s a 9x increase. And yet in the entire period from 1985 to 2015 there were plenty of people seeking the job of CEOs.
You’re telling yourself a free market capitalism just-so-story. This is the way it is, therefor this is the way it must be. But there are plenty of non-free-market forces that push ceo salaries higher. Monopolization is a big one. Tax code is another one (stock grants as pay pushed rates up), etc.
I suspect if you cut the typical CEO's pay by 90%, they'd be extremely offended and go find a job somewhere else - regardless of whether they "needed" the money. Compensation is still the primary metric that an employer uses to communicate satisfaction with performance to an employee - all other things being equal, cutting someone's pay tells them you think they're doing a poor job, affects the prestige of the role and so on.
There are obviously non-free-market forces that affect compensation but none of them work by considering the individual; they all start by considering the position and the market for the position.
The number of people looking for the position is also a meaningless metric. Go anywhere on the internet and you can find people who are desperate to get software engineering jobs and yet somehow compensation keeps going up. Only the availability of qualified candidates and the competition for them matters.
Like I said, if you cut the job's rate of pay across the board, not just at one company. There is no "elsewhere" to go in that scenario, and yet I'm sure the quality of work would be the same. People want to be CEO for status, and for the money, but the desire for money saturates quickly... you don't need 300x pay rates. You probably don't even need 10x pay rates to keep the position deeply desirable.
> There are obviously non-free-market forces that affect compensation but none of them work by considering the individual; they all start by considering the position and the market for the position.
Free market does NOT apply when you consider the individual. Considering the individual, there is no free market value to Tim Cook, because Tim Cook has a monopoly on Tim Cook. A monopoly is not a free market. Which is, of course, why he can ask for 100M/year in compensation... but it's not necessarily a good reason for anyone to pay that amount.
Anyway, all of this is academic. I'll be voting with my shares to block the pay hike, but that position will almost definitely lose.
Sure there’s an elsewhere to go: found a company and own it all. Or take a job that isn’t subject to these hypothetical caps.
If you cut the max pay of doctors to $50K/yr, in 20 years, you’d have a lot fewer high-achieving students going into medicine and doing something else (law, engineering, etc)
There’s no shortage of qualified people wanting to become doctors, and yet they only make 2-5x what the average person makes in the US. This is exactly my point. I’m not saying CEO should be a badly paid job, I’m saying beyond a saturation point, you don’t get more/better people if you pay more. I suspect the saturation point is more like 5-10x not the 30x to 300x we’ve seen in the past 40 years
My point is not about what tim cook should think, it’s about how i believe people in his position do think. Their pay keeps going up because profits are high, monopolization is high, and so when they ask boards give. But i don’t believe they’re doing that job for the pay. Or, not primarily for the pay, they probably wouldn’t do it for free.
So, it’s being put to a vote and they could deny it, and if they do the question is will he walk?
That fact that he has 2bil in the bank and is still doing the work he’s doing suggests to me that he might not. CEO of apple isn’t a fungible job. I don’t believe tim cook wants to be CEO of any other company. If he wanted to leave no dollar amount could keep him, similarly, i’m not sure a pay cut would send him packing.
>But i don’t believe they’re doing that job for the pay. Or, not primarily for the pay, they probably wouldn’t do it for free.
Perhaps I misinterpreted you post. If that is your position, than I totally agree.
>So, it’s being put to a vote and they could deny it, and if they do the question is will he walk?
I think that all depends on the alternative proposal. I think they most likely outcome if it passes is that Tim Cook will be offered more money but with a longer lockup schedule. If they came back and said "hey richie, you have enough in the bank and should work for the average salary", I think it is likely he would walk, even if he is not primarily doing it for the money.
Edited my comment to remove that bit because it distracts from the point that he is working for reasons other than money. It’s not a 1:1 comparison, but it’s valid and useful to scale big numbers down to ones we’re more familiar with and can reason about intuitively.
How’s this for perspective. Simply sitting on his 2bil invested at a 6% return he’s getting 120mil/year. He does not need that money as a motivator.
$200k can't even buy an average american house. Also, I've seen commenters on HN and reddit arguing that a $10k/yea job isn't worth having because it's lower than your cost of living.
Most people don’t make enough to retire until they are in their 60s or 70s. It sounds like we are paying these guys too much if we have to compete for attention with their massive fortune.
It awards people for being something that they cannot possibly be: worth hundreds of millions of dollars per year in compensation. Human excellence hasn't reached the point where this is the case.
They were not awarded hundreds of millions of dollars. They were awarded a number of shares or options, which may be worth hundreds of millions of dollars when and if they sell or excercise.
Either way, two entities came to a voluntary agreement on an exchange of services and compensation. I have not heard of a better model yet.
If the issue is income/wealth gaps in society, then that is better solved by implementing huge marginal income/wealth taxes such that the can be rewarded hundreds of millions of dollars, but they will only end up with a small portion of it.
So why do the owners of Apple decide to pay Tim Cook so much? Do they just not realize that they could come out ahead by only hiring CEOs willing to pay much less?
I hope this is a joke. It's a failing or at best a quirk of our economic system that Tim Cook's time can be so highly valued when any number of different piles of well educated people could do 10x more useful work for less money. It's not meritocracy. He's winning the game, but he's replaceable.
It all comes down to how you define "useful work" and value. A big part Tim Cooks value is simply being a known factor. You might not like that this is valued more than 1,000 engineers, but that doesn't change the reality of the situation.
If Tim Cook was really worth 100 million a year or more and had achieved a state of intelligence and skill unknown to humanity before, don't you think scientists would be scrambling to study his genetics?
He's just not that unique. The employees should be paid more and Tim should be paid less.
I think you entirely missed the point of my comment. Tim Cook is worth 100 million because he is the same person that ran the company last year and is a known quantity, not because he is 1000x smarter.
His value is being Tim Cook: Apple CEO since 2011. This is something that nobody else on the planet has and 1,000 engineers can't build.
Having $2 billion in assets, invested at the historic average of 7% after inflation, yields $14 million every year. The median household income is about $68k per year. Therefore, the passive income just from having $2 billion of assets comes out to about the full income of 2000 households.
That's the only way I've come up with to visualize massive wealth, as it is so far beyond anything I have experience with. That the closest visualization is the size of a town that could be entirely devoted in perpetuity to the whims of the person with that wealth.
Shoot, you're right. I miscounted the number of zeroes in the first step when copying from a python shell. All later numbers were computed from the initial values, which is why the order of magnitude was correct for the later values.
I think it would be more impressive if investors gave fewer shits about the headline comp packages of a few executives, and instead advocated that Apple pay more attention to how it's no longer creating a place that people want to develop their careers at.
Maybe this is just an endemic problem, but it seems to me that big companies have lost the ability/desire to cultivate their own people. Nowadays it's "let people's salaries and career growth stagnate if they choose to stay internal", yet complain when they jump ship to another company that's willing to pay more with a promotion. And at the same time contribute to the problem by being very willing to hire external candidates at salary multiples compared to people from inside, while putting up unreasonable bars for promotion from within.
I have yet to see any large company get this formula right. Not to say that I long for the days when you could make a career out of working for GE or something, but you imagine that some respected company (Apple?) could make it so that people wanted to grow and stay with them. Give people responsibility, roles, develop them for a career rather than trying to shortcut it with an external person who looks good but ends up being just talk.
Maybe that's impossible nowadays with the pressure to move on to a new product every 3 years.
> how it's no longer creating a place that people want to develop their careers at
I thought Apple remained one of the most admired companies in the world, to the point where they can pay lower salaries than most competitors and still get the best candidates. When are you saying that this changed?
>Nowadays it's "let people's salaries and career growth stagnate if they choose to stay internal", yet complain when they jump ship to another company that's willing to pay more. And at the same time contribute to the problem by being very willing to hire external candidates at multiples of people from inside, while putting up unreasonable bars for promotion from within.
such cross-pollination improves overall state of the industry (in particular it optimizes for efficient use of programmers time - burning that time on low productive unnecessary tasks can be done only by either very rich companies or by companies who hire cheap barrel bottom) and results in development of better technical talent at higher wages. As direct participants and beneficiaries we should celebrate it.
Just look at the alternative like say lawyers - you have to suck up to your higher-ups for many years before getting any way ahead.
Investors often have to approve in an up or down vote executive compensation. Certainly that's the case here. Sure, they could also bring up other issues, but there is no "make Apple a good place to grow your career" vote they can participate in.
I dunno. I've been hearing people make these complaints about Apple for at least 15 years. And in that time, Apple stock has gone up 50x. So it seems to have worked out pretty well for investors.
Apple is pretty well known when I look at my friends working there, at least in software and hardware engineering, to have people who have been there for a decade or more?
Apple has made cook a billionaire. The appropriate salary for him is $1. The appropriate additional capital grant is $0. He's a major shareholder, he has wealth at risk both up and down with his and the fate of the company.
If he thinks they can't replace him and go as well he has financial incentive to stay. If he thinks they can replace him and go better he only has financial incentive to stay if they pay him ever more every year.
This way of thinking is a great way to ruin a company. After that every employee will think about whether Apple will give them just the minimum so that they don't leave for another company.
2 billion dollars worth of ownership of the company is the minimum? Come on! Every single individual employee will be fired if it is in Apple's financial interest. If Apple have a large number of employees better off somewhere else they have a very, very big problem. It should be stinkingly obvious the rules of the game a quite different when you own 2 billion worth of stock compared to when you're using your paycheck to pay the rent and pay down your debt.
It sounds like the issue is that the stocks aren’t locked up for some period of years, leading to a situation where Tim Cook could take the money and run.
> Chief Executive Tim Cook's pay in 2021 was 1,447 times that of the average Apple employee, a company filing on Jan. 7 showed, fuelled by stock awards that helped him earn a total of $98.7 million.
They measure the average salary for such a large company? This number seems absolutely pointless to me.
My question is always exactly how they measure these for stock awards.
Elon did some deal that if he pumped Tesla stock up to what seemed to be unbelievable at the time heights and other what seemed like impossible goals he'd make major bank.
The target was taking tesla from something like $69B market cap to $650B market cap - he did that and got it to 800B+.
So, is his pay valued at the value when he cashes in / gets his bonus, or the value of the bonus at the time of award (much much lower).
In many countries, total payroll expenditure and total number of employees are both matters of public record. It's often the only figure that's publicly available.
I don't think you get good leaders if financial compensation is all they care about to stay. I will bet Tim Cook loves what he does at Apple and would likely stay even for $1. He has more than enough money already.
A good example is this: Greece and Italy paid their politicians best in all of Europe, while Norway pays their politicians worst. Yet it seems Greece and Italy got stuck with the worst politicians.
I don't think that is an accident. With too much focus on compensation, you just attract greedy and corrupt people rather than people who want to make a difference.
I do think CEOs should get properly compensated, but the idea that at CEO magically performs 10x better because you pay him $10 million instead of $1 million is so absurd that you have to be a libertarian to believe it ;-)
Human motivation cannot be reduced to a simple question of monetary compensation. Research into this suggest that human motivation in relation to compensation works more in terms of inflection points. If your pay is so low you feel underappriciated, you will not perform well. Once salary gets high enough that you feel appreciated, further increases is not going to increase performance.
People don't hold back performance until they get paid a billion. There is a threshold at which point people will perform as well as you can expect from compensation alone. Beyond that other facts will matter: Joy of working with your co-workers, belief in the mission, interesting tasks etc.
Building out hugely profitable services as the lifecycle of technology refresh slows has been a huge part of Apple’s recent success.
Also making huge gambles on things like M1 / Apple Silicon show that Apple is still innovating and leading the way - even in spaces that were starting to be stagnant.
Let’s also not forget hugely profitable hardware lines under Tim such as Apple becoming the number 1 biggest watch retailer by revenue, and dominating the wireless earphones market (which it pretty much established itself too).
I think the bigger challenge in this case would be finding someone credible. There's lots of people who could do as good a job or better than Tim Cook but how do you know? And not just a fear of the risk but also the difficulty of putting in someone with the credibility to make decisive decisions
i think that was more the function of the macro market. much of the foundation for microsoft’s second coming was laid by balmer. basically, i think he gets somewhat of an unfair rap ;-)
No one who worked at Microsoft under Ballmer & Satya believes this. I’m curious as to why people believe that Ballmer who missed every major tech trend, threw good money after chasing competitors and had zero idea how to build build good products “laid the foundation” versus acknowledging Satya’s significant success?
I interned at Microsoft when he was CEO and he gave us a lunch q&a.
The man is the most charismatic person I've ever seen speak in person. Given just how badly he ran Microsoft, I really think his ability to convince people of stuff is some kind of superpower.
i never said satya wasn’t an incredible leader. i’ve heard as much from friends who work at microsoft.
i just don’t think it’s fair to look at the stock price of microsoft during ballers tenure at microsoft without applying the lens of the broader market.
Apple's biggest problem is that there is probably no one at Apple today who can replace Tim. The only person with the skillset to replace Tim is Elon, but Elon's temperament is a poor fit for Apple's shareholders.
But given that his net worth is already $2B, most of which is Apple stock, it seems like he's already incentivized to set Apple up for long term success, one because he has so much stock, and two because he's clearly not working for the comp, but for the love of the game.