7 ms·

Apple chief Tim Cook faces shareholder revolt over $99M pay package

59 points by ciconia 5y ago

ZhangSWEFAANG 5y ago
I wonder who they consider "Apple employees". After doing the math, they are claiming that the average Apple employee makes 68K a year. I don't know if I buy that.
mrstorm 5y ago
FTA: "The vote against Cook’s pay package would be advisory only and Apple’s board would not be compelled to act on it."
andrewstuart 5y ago
$99M sounds very cheap to me for such success. What the heck do they want more than Apple level success?
- jakear 5y ago
  99M in dividends?
  - deleted 5y ago
    [deleted]
  - tedunangst 5y ago
    Apple pays somewhere around 13800M in dividends.
    - EvRev 5y ago
      13899M fits the Apple pricing model better.
- willis936 5y ago
  Paying to not use slave labor is a start.
- Ataraxiaist 5y ago
  Agree. I think you have to look at it as how much a foolish CEO would cost the company. This is such a different situation than a golden parachute for a leader who ran the company into the ground. Basically the opposite situation. I think the problem is that Apple is just so giant at this point it is hard to get your head around. 7X the size of Walmart or Toyota. The idea Walmart could triple in size and not even be close is not at all intuitive.
imgabe 5y ago
Government prints money, causes massive asset inflation, then people complain about the dollar value of the massively inflated assets that executives get paid in. Their pay didn't go up, the value of the dollar went down. > Last year, Cook took home $3m in salary, and received $82.3m in stock awards, $12m for hitting targets, and another $1.4m for air travel, retirement plan contributions, insurance premiums and other contributions. That's ~487,328 shares of AAPL at the last closing price. It would have been about $55.8m at last year's valuation. According to the article, his pay last year was $14.8m. Clearly he didn't get as much stock, maybe some vesting, or multi-year earn-out got paid out this year? Raise interest rates and Tim Cook's compensation will plummet. Journalists and politicians need to stop quoting stock values like they're cash. It's incredibly disingenuous. I guess it gets lots of outrage clicks, though.
- groby_b 5y ago
  Unless you'd like to make the case that we had 600% inflation in the last year, your explanation does not hold up. (Skim the article. He's poised to make 6 times more than last year) But even then, compensation packages are usually specified in dollars, not numbers of shares. And even if that weren't the case, Apple shares only increased 40% over the last year. ~20% since the fall, were compensation packages are usually hammered out. So, no, it's not inflation, as much as you'd like to complain about fiat money.
  - imgabe 5y ago
    > Unless you'd like to make the case that we had 600% inflation in the last year, your explanation does not hold up. (Skim the article. He's poised to make 6 times more than last year) Sorry, I edited my comment a few times after posting as I looked up more information and it now addresses this. It doesn't make much sense that he randomly got 6x more than last year. This was probably a stock payout of some multi-year compensation package, combined with inflated stock prices. But little nuances like that get in the way of the "eat the rich" muckraking that places like the Guardian want to push so I imagine they don't spend a lot of time investigating the details.
    - 5y ago
sircastor 5y ago
I don’t really think Tim Cook (or any company officer anywhere) deserves or needs this kind of comp. That said, I can’t imagine Apple could have performed any better in the last year. I can only assume this is some sort of attempt at a strong arm move to negotiate profit sharing or to get Apple to stop activism on some front.
bArray 5y ago
> His total remuneration package was worth $98.7m in 2021, compared with $14.8m a year earlier. Cook’s pay was 1,447 times that of the average Apple employee, according to a filing disclosed in January. So what's the argument here, that he should be paid less, or that the average employee should be paid more? One would expect the CEO _always_ get paid more than the average employee, a large difference does not mean inequity. For example, if you are the CEO of a supermarket, where employees are paid just above minimum wage on average, the CEO would likely be getting _much_ more. > In January, it briefly became the first company to be valued at $3tn, it became the first $1tn company in 2018. > Last year, Cook took home $3m in salary, and received $82.3m in stock awards, $12m for hitting targets, and another $1.4m for air travel, retirement plan contributions, insurance premiums and other contributions. Sounds like excellent value for money. The stock awards mean the better the job he does, the better his payout. They also come with strings attached (as Elon Musk learned when trying to cash-out). They also have other strings, for example with John Schnatter, who I believe was forced to sell off a majority share in the company he built [1]: > In addition to preventing him from accessing information, the corporation also implemented a "poison pill" strategy in order to limit Schnatter's chances of buying back a majority stake in the company. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Schnatter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Schnatter
- jimbob45 5y ago
  It’s just that, when you’re the guy that decides everyone’s salary that also has a heavy role in determining your own salary, it looks like you’re flagrantly abusing your power. Ideally, CEOs would be paid entirely in stock options to align their incentives with the company’s. It seems that Cook was paid in stock awards, which is better than straight cash at least.
- MuffinFlavored 5y ago
  > Cook’s pay was 1,447 times that of the average Apple employee, according to a filing disclosed in January. Numbers like that are so silly to me. Only 1 person can be CEO, let alone CEO of a multi-trillion dollar company. How many other employees at Apple (the ones we're comparing how minuscule their pay compared to the CEO) can run the company as well as he has? Vision, implementation, everything. If they can't do the job, don't talk about how unfair it is that he gets paid 1,447x more than them. Obviously I'm being hyperbolic to set somebody up for some kind of "you're missing the point" rage response. I do genuinely look forward to learning what I'm missing here. I'm worth nothing compared to Jeff Bezos... because I didn't invent and execute Amazon... Cool stat?
daniel-cussen 5y ago
That's really not obscene. When Jobs died everyone, including users on this site, was talking about how he would ruin the company despite his best intentions. I would say he did not. And come on, it's a $2 trillion company? That's less than a thousandth of the market cap.
- scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
  „Following the resignation of Apple founder Steve Jobs, incoming CEO Tim Cook called a meeting of shareholders and members of the press Thursday morning to announce that he envisioned printers as the company’s future. “Laser, ink-jet, double-sided, color, black-and-white—the future of technology is in printers. I am absolutely convinced of that,”” - https://www.theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-printers-1819572893 https://www.theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-...
  - swagasaurus-rex 5y ago
    How I would love a printer that just works
    - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
      What do you actually print, though? I don't own a printer nor scanner - and I haven't done-so for almost 10 years now. If I need to print or scan something I'd use my (pre-WFH) workplace's copier room or (as now) use my town's library's facilities. ...fortunately I haven't needed to print or scan anything at short-notice, though most "scanning" I do thesedays is through some document-scanning app on my phone which gives good-enough results. I know plenty of people want to be able to print their own photos at home, but I'm utterly unconvinced that any home inkjet or even color-laser printer is going to give results anywhere near as good as a commercial print place. And of course, there's the unavoidable HP printer-ink-costs-more-than-human-blood problem - I find it marvelous that HP has been the number 1 factor in driving people away from buying home printers.
    - tomcam 5y ago
      Stop it right now. This is not a site where you indulge your nuttiest, most insane fantasies. Seriously, though, I got one of those reservoir printers and it has finally solved all my printer issues. It cost about $380 a year ago but the great thing is I can ignore it for months at a time, then just turn it on and use it when I need to. Unlike the cheaper printers, it doesn’t dry out and start functioning.
Flatcircle 5y ago
JFC, this article is so stupid. It's equity in a company that's worth 3 trillion dollars. Would the shareholders like to get the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, or Yahoo, or Gateway, or Palm, or jawbone? If the CEO of the world's first trillion dollar company can't make a lot of money, then who can? It's a free market.
- sgt 5y ago
  Question is - does he need to?
  - imgabe 5y ago
    Who or what determines what someone needs to earn? How much do you earn? Could you survive if you got paid 15% less? How about 50% less? Well, if you don't need it then, how about we just cut your pay based on what some arbitrary person decides you "need".
    - Eji1700 5y ago
      Well in this case, the board and shareholders.
      - imgabe 5y ago
        They don't determine how much Cook or anyone needs to earn, they determine how much they are willing to pay to get the CEO they want.
    - hulitu 5y ago
      > Who or what determines what someone needs to earn? As the song says: "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends"
  - refurb 5y ago
    Question is - is it anyone's business what a company pays its CEO beyond those who own it?
refurb 5y ago
I'm going to guess this is mostly due to options which means he made a ton of money because Apple stock went up which means stockholders also made a ton of money?
tedunangst 5y ago
How many votes does ISS functionally control?
deleted 5y ago
[deleted]
ksec 5y ago
It is hard to judge the $99M package without comparing to other CEO's earning. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made about $50M in 2021. Google CEO Pichai will receive a $2M salary, plus a $240 million stock package that’s set to take effect in 2020. The stock will be granted over three years and is tied to performance targets. Assuming everything goes well that is $80M / year. An article from Bloomberg on CEO package. Just absurd numbers. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-highest-paid-ceos/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-highest-paid-ceos/
ansy 5y ago
Apple's stock is up over 1000% in the 10 years since Tim Cook became CEO. Over that time it went from a $350B company to a $2.7T company. He oversaw the creation of over $2T in value and his net worth is in the low single digit billions? If anything he's underpaid for the job he's doing.
- throwcean 5y ago
  Always when these arguments come up I wonder: is there actually a tangible way to measure how much of this was because of Cook (or whatever other CEO)? Maybe he is just riding a wave of success?! Maybe someone else would have the exact same results? To me it always seems that the success of a company is projected onto its upper management in an unhealthy way. Maybe I am just clueless however.
  - refurb 5y ago
    There is no accurate way to measure how much was because of Cook. Clearly he made some decisions as CEO that put the company on a very profitable path. But the same could be said of any job. Pay a programmer $400k. Was the work completed really worth that much?
- briffle 5y ago
  I wonder, did the regular employees see their income go up 1000% in this same timespan?
  - sinuhe69 5y ago
    If they invested their money in the company stock, certainly yes. The basic tenet of investment is simple: no risk, no reward.
vmception 5y ago
Cook should do the ultimate Fuck You to shareholders by moving to Puerto Rico under Act 60 to make it new grants that year nearly tax free, with very short vesting periods. Vesting time period is not regulated, so there is alot you can do on the board or as CEO to yourself.
coolso 5y ago
Nice how the shareholders "revolt" over $99M in pay, but selling out the American people and workers by offshoring all manufacturing to what is essentially slave labor in China is A-OK. Until they make a fuss about that, they can cry us all a river.
dukeofdoom 5y ago
I can totally see why Tim is worth it. It was his teams genius idea to take away ports and brake the keyboard design so they could charge double when they fixed them. Brilliant. $99m is enough to buy 200 people a new home, that would take normally take them 20+ years to pay off. So about the equivalent of 4,000 years of labour of the average middle class person. To put that in perspective, Jesus the carpenter would still have 2,000 years of labour left.
- hulitu 5y ago
  > I can totally see why Tim is worth it. It was his teams genius idea to take away ports and brake the keyboard design so they could charge double when they fixed them. Brilliant. He's good at marketing. That's why people buy Apple - for the real and percieved value. > $99m is enough to buy 200 people a new home, that would take normally take them 20+ years to pay off. Here some will dissagree. There are Malibu homes, there are Frankfurt homes and there are favelas homes. > So about the equivalent of 4,000 years of labour of the average middle class person. To put that in perspective, Jesus the carpenter would still have 2,000 years of labour left. That's because he spends his days in meetings. "Why are programmers non-productive? Because their time is wasted in meetings."
fartcannon 5y ago
He can have $100m only when he figures out how to take 30% of the income of all the iPhone users... and he gets them to thank him for it.

59 points by ciconia 5y ago

I wonder who they consider "Apple employees". After doing the math, they are claiming that the average Apple employee makes 68K a year. I don't know if I buy that.

mrstorm 5y ago

FTA: "The vote against Cook’s pay package would be advisory only and Apple’s board would not be compelled to act on it."

andrewstuart 5y ago

$99M sounds very cheap to me for such success. What the heck do they want more than Apple level success?

jakear 5y ago
99M in dividends?
- deleted 5y ago
  [deleted]
- tedunangst 5y ago
  Apple pays somewhere around 13800M in dividends.
  - EvRev 5y ago
    13899M fits the Apple pricing model better.
willis936 5y ago
Paying to not use slave labor is a start.
Ataraxiaist 5y ago
Agree. I think you have to look at it as how much a foolish CEO would cost the company. This is such a different situation than a golden parachute for a leader who ran the company into the ground. Basically the opposite situation. I think the problem is that Apple is just so giant at this point it is hard to get your head around. 7X the size of Walmart or Toyota. The idea Walmart could triple in size and not even be close is not at all intuitive.

imgabe 5y ago

Government prints money, causes massive asset inflation, then people complain about the dollar value of the massively inflated assets that executives get paid in. Their pay didn't go up, the value of the dollar went down. > Last year, Cook took home $3m in salary, and received $82.3m in stock awards, $12m for hitting targets, and another $1.4m for air travel, retirement plan contributions, insurance premiums and other contributions. That's ~487,328 shares of AAPL at the last closing price. It would have been about $55.8m at last year's valuation. According to the article, his pay last year was $14.8m. Clearly he didn't get as much stock, maybe some vesting, or multi-year earn-out got paid out this year? Raise interest rates and Tim Cook's compensation will plummet. Journalists and politicians need to stop quoting stock values like they're cash. It's incredibly disingenuous. I guess it gets lots of outrage clicks, though.

groby_b 5y ago
Unless you'd like to make the case that we had 600% inflation in the last year, your explanation does not hold up. (Skim the article. He's poised to make 6 times more than last year) But even then, compensation packages are usually specified in dollars, not numbers of shares. And even if that weren't the case, Apple shares only increased 40% over the last year. ~20% since the fall, were compensation packages are usually hammered out. So, no, it's not inflation, as much as you'd like to complain about fiat money.
- imgabe 5y ago
  > Unless you'd like to make the case that we had 600% inflation in the last year, your explanation does not hold up. (Skim the article. He's poised to make 6 times more than last year) Sorry, I edited my comment a few times after posting as I looked up more information and it now addresses this. It doesn't make much sense that he randomly got 6x more than last year. This was probably a stock payout of some multi-year compensation package, combined with inflated stock prices. But little nuances like that get in the way of the "eat the rich" muckraking that places like the Guardian want to push so I imagine they don't spend a lot of time investigating the details.
  - 5y ago

sircastor 5y ago

I don’t really think Tim Cook (or any company officer anywhere) deserves or needs this kind of comp. That said, I can’t imagine Apple could have performed any better in the last year. I can only assume this is some sort of attempt at a strong arm move to negotiate profit sharing or to get Apple to stop activism on some front.

bArray 5y ago

> His total remuneration package was worth $98.7m in 2021, compared with $14.8m a year earlier. Cook’s pay was 1,447 times that of the average Apple employee, according to a filing disclosed in January. So what's the argument here, that he should be paid less, or that the average employee should be paid more? One would expect the CEO _always_ get paid more than the average employee, a large difference does not mean inequity. For example, if you are the CEO of a supermarket, where employees are paid just above minimum wage on average, the CEO would likely be getting _much_ more. > In January, it briefly became the first company to be valued at $3tn, it became the first $1tn company in 2018. > Last year, Cook took home $3m in salary, and received $82.3m in stock awards, $12m for hitting targets, and another $1.4m for air travel, retirement plan contributions, insurance premiums and other contributions. Sounds like excellent value for money. The stock awards mean the better the job he does, the better his payout. They also come with strings attached (as Elon Musk learned when trying to cash-out). They also have other strings, for example with John Schnatter, who I believe was forced to sell off a majority share in the company he built [1]: > In addition to preventing him from accessing information, the corporation also implemented a "poison pill" strategy in order to limit Schnatter's chances of buying back a majority stake in the company. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Schnatter https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_Schnatter

jimbob45 5y ago
It’s just that, when you’re the guy that decides everyone’s salary that also has a heavy role in determining your own salary, it looks like you’re flagrantly abusing your power. Ideally, CEOs would be paid entirely in stock options to align their incentives with the company’s. It seems that Cook was paid in stock awards, which is better than straight cash at least.
MuffinFlavored 5y ago
> Cook’s pay was 1,447 times that of the average Apple employee, according to a filing disclosed in January. Numbers like that are so silly to me. Only 1 person can be CEO, let alone CEO of a multi-trillion dollar company. How many other employees at Apple (the ones we're comparing how minuscule their pay compared to the CEO) can run the company as well as he has? Vision, implementation, everything. If they can't do the job, don't talk about how unfair it is that he gets paid 1,447x more than them. Obviously I'm being hyperbolic to set somebody up for some kind of "you're missing the point" rage response. I do genuinely look forward to learning what I'm missing here. I'm worth nothing compared to Jeff Bezos... because I didn't invent and execute Amazon... Cool stat?

daniel-cussen 5y ago

That's really not obscene. When Jobs died everyone, including users on this site, was talking about how he would ruin the company despite his best intentions. I would say he did not. And come on, it's a $2 trillion company? That's less than a thousandth of the market cap.

scyzoryk_xyz 5y ago
„Following the resignation of Apple founder Steve Jobs, incoming CEO Tim Cook called a meeting of shareholders and members of the press Thursday morning to announce that he envisioned printers as the company’s future. “Laser, ink-jet, double-sided, color, black-and-white—the future of technology is in printers. I am absolutely convinced of that,”” - https://www.theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-printers-1819572893 https://www.theonion.com/new-apple-ceo-tim-cook-im-thinking-...
- swagasaurus-rex 5y ago
  How I would love a printer that just works
  - DaiPlusPlus 5y ago
    What do you actually print, though? I don't own a printer nor scanner - and I haven't done-so for almost 10 years now. If I need to print or scan something I'd use my (pre-WFH) workplace's copier room or (as now) use my town's library's facilities. ...fortunately I haven't needed to print or scan anything at short-notice, though most "scanning" I do thesedays is through some document-scanning app on my phone which gives good-enough results. I know plenty of people want to be able to print their own photos at home, but I'm utterly unconvinced that any home inkjet or even color-laser printer is going to give results anywhere near as good as a commercial print place. And of course, there's the unavoidable HP printer-ink-costs-more-than-human-blood problem - I find it marvelous that HP has been the number 1 factor in driving people away from buying home printers.
  - tomcam 5y ago
    Stop it right now. This is not a site where you indulge your nuttiest, most insane fantasies. Seriously, though, I got one of those reservoir printers and it has finally solved all my printer issues. It cost about $380 a year ago but the great thing is I can ignore it for months at a time, then just turn it on and use it when I need to. Unlike the cheaper printers, it doesn’t dry out and start functioning.

Flatcircle 5y ago

JFC, this article is so stupid. It's equity in a company that's worth 3 trillion dollars. Would the shareholders like to get the former CEO of Hewlett Packard, or Yahoo, or Gateway, or Palm, or jawbone? If the CEO of the world's first trillion dollar company can't make a lot of money, then who can? It's a free market.

sgt 5y ago
Question is - does he need to?
- imgabe 5y ago
  Who or what determines what someone needs to earn? How much do you earn? Could you survive if you got paid 15% less? How about 50% less? Well, if you don't need it then, how about we just cut your pay based on what some arbitrary person decides you "need".
  - Eji1700 5y ago
    Well in this case, the board and shareholders.
    - imgabe 5y ago
      They don't determine how much Cook or anyone needs to earn, they determine how much they are willing to pay to get the CEO they want.
  - hulitu 5y ago
    > Who or what determines what someone needs to earn? As the song says: "Oh Lord, won't you buy me a Mercedes Benz? My friends all drive Porsches, I must make amends"
- refurb 5y ago
  Question is - is it anyone's business what a company pays its CEO beyond those who own it?

refurb 5y ago

I'm going to guess this is mostly due to options which means he made a ton of money because Apple stock went up which means stockholders also made a ton of money?

tedunangst 5y ago

How many votes does ISS functionally control?

deleted 5y ago

[deleted]

ksec 5y ago

It is hard to judge the $99M package without comparing to other CEO's earning. Microsoft CEO Satya Nadella made about $50M in 2021. Google CEO Pichai will receive a $2M salary, plus a $240 million stock package that’s set to take effect in 2020. The stock will be granted over three years and is tied to performance targets. Assuming everything goes well that is $80M / year. An article from Bloomberg on CEO package. Just absurd numbers. https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-highest-paid-ceos/ https://www.bloomberg.com/graphics/2021-highest-paid-ceos/

ansy 5y ago

Apple's stock is up over 1000% in the 10 years since Tim Cook became CEO. Over that time it went from a $350B company to a $2.7T company. He oversaw the creation of over $2T in value and his net worth is in the low single digit billions? If anything he's underpaid for the job he's doing.

throwcean 5y ago
Always when these arguments come up I wonder: is there actually a tangible way to measure how much of this was because of Cook (or whatever other CEO)? Maybe he is just riding a wave of success?! Maybe someone else would have the exact same results? To me it always seems that the success of a company is projected onto its upper management in an unhealthy way. Maybe I am just clueless however.
- refurb 5y ago
  There is no accurate way to measure how much was because of Cook. Clearly he made some decisions as CEO that put the company on a very profitable path. But the same could be said of any job. Pay a programmer $400k. Was the work completed really worth that much?
briffle 5y ago
I wonder, did the regular employees see their income go up 1000% in this same timespan?
- sinuhe69 5y ago
  If they invested their money in the company stock, certainly yes. The basic tenet of investment is simple: no risk, no reward.

vmception 5y ago

Cook should do the ultimate Fuck You to shareholders by moving to Puerto Rico under Act 60 to make it new grants that year nearly tax free, with very short vesting periods. Vesting time period is not regulated, so there is alot you can do on the board or as CEO to yourself.

coolso 5y ago

Nice how the shareholders "revolt" over $99M in pay, but selling out the American people and workers by offshoring all manufacturing to what is essentially slave labor in China is A-OK. Until they make a fuss about that, they can cry us all a river.

dukeofdoom 5y ago

I can totally see why Tim is worth it. It was his teams genius idea to take away ports and brake the keyboard design so they could charge double when they fixed them. Brilliant. $99m is enough to buy 200 people a new home, that would take normally take them 20+ years to pay off. So about the equivalent of 4,000 years of labour of the average middle class person. To put that in perspective, Jesus the carpenter would still have 2,000 years of labour left.

hulitu 5y ago
> I can totally see why Tim is worth it. It was his teams genius idea to take away ports and brake the keyboard design so they could charge double when they fixed them. Brilliant. He's good at marketing. That's why people buy Apple - for the real and percieved value. > $99m is enough to buy 200 people a new home, that would take normally take them 20+ years to pay off. Here some will dissagree. There are Malibu homes, there are Frankfurt homes and there are favelas homes. > So about the equivalent of 4,000 years of labour of the average middle class person. To put that in perspective, Jesus the carpenter would still have 2,000 years of labour left. That's because he spends his days in meetings. "Why are programmers non-productive? Because their time is wasted in meetings."

fartcannon 5y ago

He can have $100m only when he figures out how to take 30% of the income of all the iPhone users... and he gets them to thank him for it.