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> Levandowski was able to collect more than $120 million in incentive pay from Google, the complaint says, “all while he was breaching his obligations to Google
by itsmemattchung 10y ago
> Levandowski was able to collect more than $120 million in incentive pay from Google, the complaint says, “all while he was breaching his obligations to Google and building a company that would compete with Google.”
Uh.... that's a ridiculous amount of money to try and incentivize someone.
- meddlepal 10y agoApparently not enough to incentivize him to not steal.
- bitmapbrother 10y agoGreed knows no boundaries. This is a person that always wanted to be part of the three comma club.
- selimthegrim 10y agoHe's probably hoping now he won't end up stuck with the doors that only slide back and forth made of bars.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- wapz 10y agoTruthfully he might not even be scared of jail. He probably has the most power in uber right now in terms of negotiation and can probably get immunity for a full confession.
- brilliantcode 10y agoMaybe $100,000,000 USD is like pocket change over there. $100,000,000 USD is $133,855,000 CAD! Clearly, Google should've hired a Canadian, our country is paying smart people to leave our economy.
- sctb 10y agoCan you please not post unsubstantively, like we've asked?
- brilliantcode 10y agoNothing I wrote is false, so what is your problem? Who is this mysterious group known as "We"?
- tartuffe78 10y agoThere are two measurements of money, none and not enough.
- rory096 10y agoThose were presumably earn-outs from the companies Google acquired from Levandowski, not employee incentives. http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/the-unknown-startup-that-built-googles-first-selfdriving-car http://spectrum.ieee.org/robotics/artificial-intelligence/th...
- austenallred 10y agoAt the kind of scale Google operates on it's not crazy for one person (especially an executive) to drive $100m in value.
- M_Grey 10y agoIs it? It's understandable why they'd want to claim that, and why a culture might exist of mutually rewarding "brilliant leadership" with "competitive packages", but... come on. What do you think the ratio of people who are actually, individually responsible for $100m in value, to the people receiving compensation as though they were, might really be?
- austenallred 10y agoI think there are very, very few people who are worth $100m, but I absolutely believe that there are those people, especially within a company like Google. This isn't the first time Google tried to keep an exec by paying them $50m+ (nor is it the second) http://www.businessinsider.com/neal-mohan-googles-100-million-man-2013-4 http://www.businessinsider.com/neal-mohan-googles-100-millio... http://fortune.com/2016/03/29/googles-pichai-received-100-million/ http://fortune.com/2016/03/29/googles-pichai-received-100-mi...
- M_Grey 10y agoI hear you, but I still wonder what kind of evidence I'd want to see laid out in front of me before parting with a cool $100 mil, and I somehow doubt that's how these things work.
- maxerickson 10y agoI think the calculation is probably different when you are making "big bets" with other people's money.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- pvelagal 10y agoMay be google or any other company should treat these new initiatives as a separate startup company to begin with, with seed money as the input. Engineers hired should have salaries/options just like founders/co-founders. If the company achieves its objectives, Google or any other company should buy them back at a certain price or let the highest bidder buy (like uber or any other company).No body loses. Giving 100 million dollars upfront without any sense of ownership/accountability to drive a startup like effort, looks silly to me.
- jonas21 10y agoThat's essentially what incentive pay is: payments tied to achieving particular objectives.
- cshenton 10y agoYeah Google has done this in the past. It's what they did with Google Wave. But Lazlo Bock has reflected that this caused the a lot of departures when the project failed. Not sure if they do that anymore.
- tsunamifury 10y agoThey got the leading self driving car out of it. It's a lot to pay if it failed, it's a great investment of it suceeded
- londons_explore 10y agoLeading a few years back. We haven't heard anything else apart from a Waymo rebranding in multiple years. My guess: The top people left, and the project lost momentum. I expect to see it grind on for a few years before being canned.
- tsunamifury 10y agoThis seems like a troll, since in no way would this be true to anyone who is even remotely paid attention to the space.
- 10y ago
- InclinedPlane 10y agoI find that sentiment laughable, to be honest. Would anyone blink an eye at a CEO earning that much or having that much in incentive pay over perhaps a number of years? Of course not. But the only reason to have such differing opinions is a classist attitude. Indeed, look how bizarre a world we live in has come to be. Nobody today would think it too ridiculous for an actor or entertainment figure to be paid so much. And yet a single engineer could easily have a much larger impact on the day to day life of millions of people or on the development of technologies spawning multibillion dollar industries.