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Tim Cook earned over 1,400 times the average Apple worker in 2021
- chroem- 5y agoChasing after CEOs is a red herring. There should be more outrage directed at the financial institutions that really pull the strings.
- henryfjordan 5y agoIf you put Tim Cook on the assembly line or on the cash register at an Apple store, do you think he would even keep up? If you took someone off the assembly line and make them CEO, would Apple's output crater to 1/1400th of what they produce today?
- NovemberWhiskey 5y agoIt's unclear to me the answers to these questions tell us anything useful.
- titanomachy 5y agoPossibly more relevant: if you took someone off the assembly line and put them in charge ten years ago, would the company perform worse by at least the value of Tim Cook's compensation over that period? Impossible to know for sure (can't A/B test history), but my guess would be "probably".
- serverholic 5y agoAre you really suggesting an assembly line worker could do the job of Apple's CEO?
- henryfjordan 5y agoI'm saying they could do it better than their pay ratio currently suggests. Being a CEO is not that hard.
- tlholaday 5y ago> Being a CEO is not that hard. Being an extraordinary CEO is very difficult.
- henryfjordan 5y agoSo is being an extraordinary assembly line worker
- gremlinsinc 5y agoYeah, it takes grit to exploit people left and right, all day everyday. Most people aren't cut out for that amount of evil... Ironically I want to be a CEO but of a worker-coop that has a cap on pay, union-built in, and flat management style... read: ethical CEO.
- missedthecue 5y agoAre you speaking from experience or have you never actually run a multi-trillion dollar company and you're simply making assumptions?
- ipaddr 5y agoNo one on here is speaking from experience. Are you expecting only replies from multi trillion dollar company CEOs? Let's try to keep the gatekeeping down. Pretending only multi-trillion dollar company CEOs opinions are the only ones that count is dishonest.
- missedthecue 5y agoNo I don't think he is the CEO of a multi trillion dollar firm, hence why I find his absolute statement about the simplicity of such an occupation peculiar.
- el_ravager 5y agoWe're saying literally anyone could do the job of Apple's CEO.
- yupper32 5y agoI'd guess that if you took a group of people on some of the the lowest totem poles at Apple and had them replace the entire C-Suite, Apple's output would certainly crater. Probably to bankruptcy (though it might take a while, Apple has huge cash reserves). Replacing one individual from the C-Suite could maybe get carried by the rest. And yes, the other way would work fine. Having the C-Suite take over an individual store would be fine.
- henryfjordan 5y agoI very much doubt the C-Suite could take over a busy store with no training and run it. Customer interactions require skill. Knowing how the register works or how to order more inventory requires training. I have no doubt they could do it with proper training. I also have no doubt that if you took a random apple store employee and gave them Tim Cook's education that they could be a passable CEO.
- yupper32 5y agoTim Cook's education? Are you saying they'll all spend 12 years at IBM, ending at the director level while getting their MBA at Duke, then spend time being a COO and VP at other companies, and then finally replacing Tim Cook? Ok fair. I think comparing that to a few weeks of training to run a store is wild.
- henryfjordan 5y agoThe headline literally compares them though. Tim Cook is paid 1400x the average worker. Do you think someone working in an Apple store would rather be there than getting an MBA at Duke? or being COO somewhere? Tim Cook was incredibly privileged to get the education and opportunities that he did. I'm not saying he wouldn't be a better CEO than most, but most people don't get to try so we don't know that fact. He's absolutely not 1400x times better than people with similar education. Even Apple isn't doing that well. If luck had him become CEO of IBM instead of Apple we wouldn't be praising him as "extraordinary" just because of circumstance.
- viktorcode 5y agoMost likely he wouldn't. The second statement is false equivalence. The equivalent comparison would be "if you took someone from the assembly line and make them CEO, would Apple's cost grow 1000% in ten years?"
- stanmancan 5y agoNo kidding. Apple has added $2,500,000,000,000 to it's market cap since Tim Cook took over in 2011. If you think "anyone could do that" then I don't really know what to say.
- ipaddr 5y agoSo you assert that moving Tim to another company would see that company grow as the same rate? Steve Jobs setup Apple with so much success that I would have given half of Tim's salary to Steve's estate and still felt that we are ripping off of Steve. Tim Cook is a caretaker CEO who didn't add that value himself. He was smart enough not to do anything to take Apple off of the path it was on but lacks vision. Apple sits on boatloads of money that could have been used to secure a key vertical in the future.
- stanmancan 5y ago> So you assert that moving Tim to another company would see that company grow as the same rate? No, never said anything of the sort. > Tim Cook is a caretaker CEO who didn't add that value himself. The market cap begs to differ. He is far from the product visionary that Steve Jobs was but he is great at execution. There is a reason Jobs picked him as his successor.
- steelstraw 5y agoIf you randomly took someone off the assembly line and made them CEO, yes, that would paralyze the company. Conversely, putting Tim Apple on a cash register would just slow down 1 cash register.
- oliv__ 5y agoSo what? I'm sure the value he adds to Apple is 1400x that of the average worker.
- Asooka 5y agoI can see him being a bit more valuable than the average worker. 10 times? Most probably. 100 times? Maybe. 1000 times? Don't be ridiculous.
- stingrae 5y agoHow much would the stock drop if he were to leave Apple today?
- gompertz 5y agoIt would probably drop 10% or so (out of investor uncertainty) and in 1 to 2 months be back to where it was, regardless of successor.
- yupper32 5y agoWhat if they replaced him with someone currently making the average compensation at Apple?
- gompertz 5y agoThere are probably many adequate CEOs already within Apple, making average compensation. You seem to believe CEOs are minted; they all move up the ranks like the rest of us. If the skills are there to lead a company, investors don't care what their last pay scale or job title was and trust the Board or Directors in who is appointed.
- williadc 5y agoBy that logic, the members of the Fed should be on every tech company's payroll.
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- laluser 5y agoOkay, not defending his pay here, but 1,400 median employee salaries is not that crazy. First, think about the valuation of Apple since Tim took over. Yes, it's not all attributed to him, but he has definitely made some very good decisions along the way, despite being set up with a money printer. Secondly, for every successful CEO package, there are hundreds of others that you don't hear about because they failed to meet goals laid out in their compensation package. Finally, these compensation packages are set up a few years before with targets that the company needs to meet.
- throwhauser 5y ago> Secondly, for every successful CEO package, there are hundreds of others that you don't hear about because they failed to meet goals laid out in their compensation package Are there any notable examples of a CEO missing a target and getting paid less than they could have?
- mushufasa 5y agoIt's notable if they meet the targets, not if they miss the targets. So, no, we wouldn't hear about the reverse in the news.
- throwhauser 5y agoThen how do we know this phenomenon exists?
- mushufasa 5y agoAre we asking how do we know when companies fail, or how do we know whether committees set executive compensation based on targets? Executive compensation for public companies is actually public -- shareholders vote on it every year in the proxy filings. This is sometimes called "Say on Pay"
- gremlinsinc 5y ago
- newaccount2021 5y ago
- mattnewton 5y agoNit: Isn't this number taking into account stock that vested this year from a multi-year cliff, and stock appreciation that happened during that time? If so, seems misleading to not amortize it over the period of the grant.
- viktorcode 5y agoFrom the article: > fueled by stock awards that helped him earn a total of nearly $100 million.
- andrewjf 5y agoThat's not really a nitpick, it's bad faith. That stock was granted when he took over as CEO and had two vests at 5 years and 10 years. He'd been "earning" it all along and should be amortized over the term, even if for tax purposes it's not.
- hnburnsy 5y agoReporters and editors still equating average and median.
- dragonwriter 5y ago> Reporters and editors still equating average and median. Median is an average and usually the most relevant average, in the cases where you don't have a distribution where the main averages (median, arithmetic mean, and mode) are all the same.
- hnburnsy 5y ago>Median is an average and usually the most relevant average, in the cases where you don't have a distribution where the main averages (median, arithmetic mean, and mode) are all the same. Huh? I can assure you Apple can darn well calculate the median and average salary for its employees.
- wenc 5y agoI think OP meant that the mean is a type of “average”. In casual speech we equate “mean” to “average” but the word average actually denotes a class of central tendencies that include the mean, median etc. Yes it’s a semantic point but just wanted to provide some context.
- olliej 5y agoObviously we should be using the mode of salaries :D
- vorpalhex 5y agoLet me save you a click: > fueled by stock awards that helped him earn a total of nearly $100 million. It was overwhelmingly stock, not direct pay.
- olliej 5y agoAnd it was an award the took ten years to vest, so annually it was 10 million. Still a lot of money per year, but no longer 1400x.
- missedthecue 5y agoAnd it was part of a multi year vesting cliff. He earned 'only' $14m in 2020, so they cherrypicked one particular year that had a very high vesting event to make this seem more egregious than perhaps it is. Really, the stock comp should be amortized over the whole vesting period.
- costcopizza 5y agoCongrats Tim, I'm going to buy a $19 Apple Polishing Cloth in celebration.
- tlholaday 5y agoQuestion: are there any barriers to workers forming a collective and hiring Tim Cook to manage them at, say, 1399 instead of 1400?
- bakoo 5y agoI can't see the point in paying anyone this much, no matter what they do.
- stanmancan 5y agoIn total, he earned $98.7 million, compared with $14.8 million in 2020. In September, Cook received 333,987 restricted stock units, in his first stock grant since 2011 as part of a long-term equity plan. "CEO received first stock grant worth $55M in a decade after the company adds $2.5T in market cap in that same time period"
- nojito 5y agoThere’s a really insightful podcast as to why CEO pay has seemingly exploded. https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/22/622646316/episode-682-when-ceo-pay-exploded https://www.npr.org/sections/money/2018/06/22/622646316/epis...
- jpurnell 5y ago1) Yes, and it was from a stock award for him hitting targets set in 2011 2) From https://www.ft.com/content/17ecb0a0-8e60-4d02-b1fc-f497c9e31331 https://www.ft.com/content/17ecb0a0-8e60-4d02-b1fc-f497c9e31... [paywall]: "Tim Cook’s triumph as Jobs’ successor has been so unparalleled that the numbers don’t speak for themselves so much as they scream: Apple’s market value has grown by more than $700m a day from when Cook took over in August 2011 to this week when it struck $3tn, before falling back." I think 1/7th of one day's market appreciation for ten years' work is fair.
- ipaddr 5y agoPut that way it seems so fair. Why not offer that to the average Apple employee?
- olliej 5y agoNot defending it (I think it’s relatively appalling) but this isn’t really out of line with CEO pay elsewhere.