Why even concern yourself with such matters? I guarantee there are millionaires here who are thankful for the growth and returns Apple's stock has provided them and they are free to spend (or not spend) their gains as they see fit. Being bitter about someone else's gains will help no one, especially not you.
Please....you seem to have issues with working class people asking for a better wage. Why concern yourself?
These salaries are not unusual. These are the market salaries for top Executives in a MegaCap company. If Apple did not offer these salaries most of the top executives would leave. They are getting paid simular salaries as Microsoft, Google, and Walmart executives. Would you be willing to get paid $50,000 if someone was offering the same job for $500,000? Of course not. Stop being judgemental and jealous.
You should get mad at executives like the clowns at GTAT who make millions yet make their company go bankrupt.
If you want the best talent you need to pay the market price or even more. The $70M for the retail boss is a one time signing bonus. She will not make even close to $70M next year.
If you want obscene salaries look at David Tepper who made $3.5 BILLION in 2013 running a hedge fund.
Sure, I understand supply and demand and compared to hedge fund managers everyone at Apple contributes something 'real' to this world and as such have something useful to offer. I am not being judgemental in the sense that I am putting anyone down for earning high wages and I am not jealous... Ok, just a little , my comments have more to do with the insanity of the amounts. There is a real world disconnect which allows us to feel it is OK to pay someone that much. The fact that Tim Cook is at the very heart of Apple's unbelievable performance is unquestionably true and he is deservedly recognized for that. And even with the kinds of political views that I have I'd personally hand over the cash were I a member of the Apple board if it was a question of him staying or leaving. But I guess this is where I differ from most ardent free marketeers - I believe in some kind of external control mechanism because from my point of view it is all out of control.
She's a woman, so she looks good in Tim Cook's all-new politically correct Apple. Ideally, she'd be a lesbian, mixed-race Muslim. I'm sure Cook's working on it; perhaps he'll persuade Iovine to become transgender so as to include those who don't want to be defined by gender. It's all about diversity and multi-culturalism.
Now that Apple are resting on the laurels of Jobs, it's more important that Cook turns Apple into his own pet political project. So far, he's well on his way.
Your filthy and blatant xenophobia is downright sickening. It's stunning that you and Apple ][ are able to get away with this crap on this forum. Yep, Angela got where she was because "she's a woman". Yup. If only you were a woman, you'd be an Apple VP, eh Frost?
"Resting on the laurels of jobs"? The progress that Apple has made in the past 1-2 yrs on both a hardware and software front is fucking massive, and the bugs that we are seeing are the direct result of massive additions and changes in every single aspect of their products. Bugs that trolls like you are so eager to point out and sensationalize. The complete opposite of "resting on laurels". Jobs would be utterly disgusted with people like you, who have nothing better to do then troll, mock, and deride his company to no end, using his name to baselessly and drag Apple through the mud. All this hatred and anger from you, because Apple has a woman on their exec team, and Tim Cook also happens to be a human being with a conscience, besides being an excellent CEO that has exploded Apple's success. In all tour THOUSANDS of posts hating against Apple, not ONCE have I seen you post a single, real suggestion of what they SHOULD do instead. Because you don't even have the imagination to come up with anything, let alone even come close to executing it. Instead, the best you can do is make excuses and pretexts over why you're so full of hatred that a gay man is leading Apple, while your life is consumed by being a nobody spouting bile on a message board.
I'd say I'm shocked at your crazed hatred- but I'm not. But here's a newsflash- your hero Steve Jobs also hated bigots.
Why even concern yourself with such matters? I guarantee there are millionaires here who are thankful for the growth and returns Apple's stock has provided them and they are free to spend (or not spend) their gains as they see fit. Being bitter about someone else's gains will help no one, especially not you.
Bitter? You mistake me, I am far from bitter.
I do get annoyed though at how the instruments of corporations seem to think it is about them and not the company.
Companies are self serving, people are their instruments, sensors and mouths. The true company is non-profit, as in all its surplus revenue pours directly back into achieving its aims. In Australian corporate law actions by the instruments that harm or otherwise reduce the company's capacity to achieve its aims are actually prosecutable. I doubt there is much difference in American law.
Funding human addiction to money is probably not one of Apple's aims, could be but i doubt it. Paying instruments serves the aims, making sure they have enough to do their job well serves the aims.
Giving an instrument a life time supply of money each year does not serve the aim. Once a life time supply has been given, well if you can't manage it then it is not the company's fault. If the instrument wants millions more it can use the already given life time supply to achieve that.
I see this kind of annual payout as a crime against the corporation. Apple the corporate entity really should prosecute its senior instruments for open embezzlement of company funds and being in breach of corporate law.
angela is being primed as the next in line to Cook. Thus the reason for the large salary and effort in getting her to Apple. Cook will eventually leave Apple for a political career - making a run for office in 2020-2024.
She's a woman, so she looks good in Tim Cook's all-new politically correct Apple. Ideally, she'd be a lesbian, mixed-race Muslim. I'm sure Cook's working on it; perhaps he'll persuade Iovine to become transgender so as to include those who don't want to be defined by gender. It's all about diversity and multi-culturalism.
Now that Apple are resting on the laurels of Jobs, it's more important that Cook turns Apple into his own pet political project. So far, he's well on his way.
Your filthy and blatant xenophobia is downright sickening. It's stunning that you and Apple ][ are able to get away with this crap on this forum. Yep, Angela got where she was because "she's a woman". Yup. If only you were a woman, you'd be an Apple VP, eh Frost?
"Resting on the laurels of jobs"? Trolls like you regurgitate this lazy vomit no matter what the facts are. The progress that Apple has made in the past 1-2 yrs on both a hardware and software front is fucking massive, and the bugs that we are seeing are the direct result of massive additions and changes in every single aspect of their products. Bugs that trolls like you are so eager to point out and sensationalize. The complete opposite of "resting on laurels". Jobs would be utterly disgusted with people like you, who have nothing better to do then troll, mock, and deride his company to no end, using his name to baselessly and drag Apple through the mud. All this hatred and anger from you, because Apple has a woman on their exec team, and Tim Cook also happens to be a human being with a conscience, besides being an excellent CEO that has exploded Apple's success. In all tour THOUSANDS of posts hating against Apple, not ONCE have I seen you post a single, real suggestion of what they SHOULD do instead. Because you don't even have the imagination to come up with anything, let alone even come close to executing it. Instead, the best you can do is make excuses and pretexts over why you're so full of hatred that a gay man is leading Apple, while your life is consumed by being a nobody spouting bile on a message board.
I'd say I'm shocked at your crazed hatred- but I'm not. But here's a newsflash- your hero Steve Jobs also hated bigots- so he would have also been disgusted by the likes of you.
Tim Cook deserves what he got paid, since he is the CEO of Apple afterall, but what has that woman, Angela Ahrendts, done to deserve her sum yet?
well, the simple analogy is that Tim is the GM of a great athletic team. To win big, they need a home run hitter. When you 'sell stuff' head of retail would be your clean-up hitter... your QB, your Kobe/LeBron/MichaelJordan. You make a hard decision based on the economics of your market [revenue, market share, mind share (I think 'Yankees' here or Manchester United)], and the economics of 'her'market [free agency so to speak].
A good leader pays for the talent that is needed to win the game, regardless of his/her own salary. It's a small person who has to earn more than his/her subordinates.
We should hope that she is the 'straw that stirs the drink' Apple has great tech product [Functional High Ground arguments notwithstanding], now they need to convert/maintain/extend that into great consumer product. Angela is being asked to do that. And Tim/Apple can't afford underperforming in that position.
From Wiki: "When Ahrendts was working at Burberry, the family lived in a 12,000 square feet (1,100 m2) home on an 8 acres (3.2 ha) plot west of London.
show me why you are actually worth it.. for example, that you do pay your own way and all that annual income feeds directly into charities and things that help others and mean something to you.
If you were in their position would you expect to justify your income to random people? The problem isn't with the people taking advantage of the system, it's a fundamental problem with the way wealth goes around. When we read about Apple taking 86% of the smartphone industry profits:
it's great from the point of view that Apple is doing well. However, that inevitably means the 2014 revenue of $183b, net income of $39b, assets of over $100b is being assigned to people associated with Apple, mostly its shareholders, which is a small amount of people.
$12b of the revenue went to their 46,000 staff (heavily weighted to top staff of course) and maybe some of the $6b in R&D.
There isn't an easy solution for this. As your example pointed out, someone lived for 10 years, smoking, playing games and watching anime on a far smaller income. Taking that person's disability out of the consideration, healthy people would do the same. That's not necessarily a bad thing but not everyone thinks that's a good way to live. Elon Musk was asked about holidays and he said that he gets bored pretty quickly if he goes to the beach for too long.
For a lot of these people, their job is like playing games and watching TV. In that sense it's best that they get most of the income because regardless of the income, it won't disincentivize them to contribute. If you gave a great salary to a low-level employee who had to deal with annoying customers all day, they wouldn't last in that job role very long. I think this would be a positive thing for people as a whole as it means a higher quality of living but it could easily lead to a shortage of staff for menial jobs if it's not done the right way.
There is a very clear problem and even the people at the top are concerned by it:
"Just 80 individuals now have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people – half the entire global population. Last year, the best-off 1% owned 48% of the world’s wealth, up from 44% five years ago. On current trends, the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together next year. The 0.1% have been doing even better, quadrupling their share of US income since the 1980s."
These numbers include developing countries where earnings are very low but also living costs differ. Plus it's really muddled because of stocks and shares. Jeff Bezos has a net worth of around $30b and yet his company makes no profit. Cash and other tangible assets have been obfuscated so much that there's no clear picture of what wealth is going where. If you started a company, split it into 1000 shares, sold 999 shares for $1 and the last share for $1b, your company could be valued at $1 trillion but the $1 trillion doesn't exist, it's just a valuation and yet it can be used to manipulate other assets and would count in income comparisons. It would likely have to be more shares than that but this happened with Elon Musk recently where Google invested $1b for 10% of SpaceX. A single trade that valued SpaceX at $10b. Last year it was valued at $4-5b.
The link above suggests that taxation is the way forward:
"The thinking person’s Davos oligarch realises that allowing things to carry on as they are is dangerous. So some want a more “inclusive capitalism” – including more progressive taxes – to save the system from itself."
Wealthy people want to avoid taxes as much as possible because they see it as going into the pockets of politicians but the reality is that politicians take a very small amount. Most gets spent on jobs in education, the military, healthcare and so on. But nobody wants the government taking their earnings to give to people to live comfortably on welfare and that caused the problems in France where wealthy people moved out of France to avoid the 75% tax rate on the wealthy.
The debt problem needs to be tackled - housing debt, education debt. Credit cards and other loans are voluntary but everyone needs a home and it benefits everyone if people are sufficiently educated. Nowadays students are coming out of universities and colleges saddled with on average $26k of debt:
It takes a lot of money to take on a mortgage and a significant portion is on interest - you could end up paying double what a home is worth. All the while wages aren't increasing to combat inflation so living costs go up.
Some people like to think it will all sort itself out if nobody interferes but that's obviously not happening because the man-made system is promoting wealth accumulation at the top and debt accumulation at the bottom and the financial services industry is screwing everyone because it has too much control. Eventually that system will keep income diverging and if you were to take it to an extreme level where 80 people owned 95% of the world's assets and income, leaving 5% for the rest, it should be obvious to anyone that this is unsustainable.
I personally wouldn't address it with taxation because that deprives wealthy people of assets, which they resist. I would make it a requirement that people with large cash income invest in property and allow low income working class people to live in the property rent-free or with a small fee but without the same burdens as a landlord. If the tenants save up enough money, they can buy their own home without having to pay the interest. Colleges and universities should all be funded by businesses and it would be free entry but courses would be shorter and more condensed without such long breaks. Make the business-funded programs 2 years long and anything beyond that would be funded by loans or personal expenses. Businesses would help refine the courses for required skills.
I also think that there should be a law that grants all employees shares in a company based on their job role. This allows them to earn dividends on company income. They wouldn't be allowed to sell the shares, they'd just be allocated dividends while they were working for the company and the company would retain the shares when they left and they'd be non-voting shares.
Take away the debt without over-taxing the rich, incentivize the work and it should help balance things out.
I agree with Paxman. We have become numbed by the enormity of corporate salaries. Especially galling are the truckloads of money paid to execs who show up late in the game, then depart after a ccuple of years, often having failed. It's high stakes nonsense, like the difference between the 5% the real estate agent makes on a modest house in suburbia vs. the 5% earned by the agent who sold Aaron Spelling's widow's house in California a while back. Did the latter agent work exponentially harder than the former? It's wrong pegging salaries to the value of the company. The two figures do not have a direct causal relationship. We are allowing the wealth of nations to be hoarded.
Everyone needs to remember that people get paid for making the company money. Apple believes that she will make them money or they would not have given her this much. Now these are not stupid people so they know that customers will respond to what she does. Meaning, it is the consumer that buys Apple products and brings them profits. So don't begrudge what she is doing or making. It is only made possible by all the millions of people who buy the products. It is the consumer that is responsible for these outrageous salaries and benefits.
Comments
Where'd you guys get that clip art of a bag of money?
That's so Looney Tunes.
Why even concern yourself with such matters? I guarantee there are millionaires here who are thankful for the growth and returns Apple's stock has provided them and they are free to spend (or not spend) their gains as they see fit. Being bitter about someone else's gains will help no one, especially not you.
Please....you seem to have issues with working class people asking for a better wage. Why concern yourself?
She doesn't need to do anything.
She's a woman, so she looks good in Tim Cook's all-new politically correct Apple. Ideally, she'd be a lesbian, mixed-race Muslim. I'm sure Cook's working on it; perhaps he'll persuade Iovine to become transgender so as to include those who don't want to be defined by gender. It's all about diversity and multi-culturalism.
Now that Apple are resting on the laurels of Jobs, it's more important that Cook turns Apple into his own pet political project. So far, he's well on his way.
Your filthy and blatant xenophobia is downright sickening. It's stunning that you and Apple ][ are able to get away with this crap on this forum. Yep, Angela got where she was because "she's a woman". Yup. If only you were a woman, you'd be an Apple VP, eh Frost?
"Resting on the laurels of jobs"? The progress that Apple has made in the past 1-2 yrs on both a hardware and software front is fucking massive, and the bugs that we are seeing are the direct result of massive additions and changes in every single aspect of their products. Bugs that trolls like you are so eager to point out and sensationalize. The complete opposite of "resting on laurels". Jobs would be utterly disgusted with people like you, who have nothing better to do then troll, mock, and deride his company to no end, using his name to baselessly and drag Apple through the mud. All this hatred and anger from you, because Apple has a woman on their exec team, and Tim Cook also happens to be a human being with a conscience, besides being an excellent CEO that has exploded Apple's success. In all tour THOUSANDS of posts hating against Apple, not ONCE have I seen you post a single, real suggestion of what they SHOULD do instead. Because you don't even have the imagination to come up with anything, let alone even come close to executing it. Instead, the best you can do is make excuses and pretexts over why you're so full of hatred that a gay man is leading Apple, while your life is consumed by being a nobody spouting bile on a message board.
I'd say I'm shocked at your crazed hatred- but I'm not. But here's a newsflash- your hero Steve Jobs also hated bigots.
You know how it is with corporations being dominated by female execs¡
Why even concern yourself with such matters? I guarantee there are millionaires here who are thankful for the growth and returns Apple's stock has provided them and they are free to spend (or not spend) their gains as they see fit. Being bitter about someone else's gains will help no one, especially not you.
Bitter? You mistake me, I am far from bitter.
I do get annoyed though at how the instruments of corporations seem to think it is about them and not the company.
Companies are self serving, people are their instruments, sensors and mouths. The true company is non-profit, as in all its surplus revenue pours directly back into achieving its aims. In Australian corporate law actions by the instruments that harm or otherwise reduce the company's capacity to achieve its aims are actually prosecutable. I doubt there is much difference in American law.
Funding human addiction to money is probably not one of Apple's aims, could be but i doubt it. Paying instruments serves the aims, making sure they have enough to do their job well serves the aims.
Giving an instrument a life time supply of money each year does not serve the aim. Once a life time supply has been given, well if you can't manage it then it is not the company's fault. If the instrument wants millions more it can use the already given life time supply to achieve that.
I see this kind of annual payout as a crime against the corporation. Apple the corporate entity really should prosecute its senior instruments for open embezzlement of company funds and being in breach of corporate law.
As should many others.
Really?
Why isn't that paid for out of his own salary.
I read "cash-out" as that he this in lieu of vacation days he didn't use.
When you consider Justin Bieber got 80 million last year, these guys are all getting underpaid.
Where did she relocate from?
For $458,000? Mars?
Touched a nerve, have I?
Tim Cook deserves what he got paid, since he is the CEO of Apple afterall, but what has that woman, Angela Ahrendts, done to deserve her sum yet?
well, the simple analogy is that Tim is the GM of a great athletic team. To win big, they need a home run hitter. When you 'sell stuff' head of retail would be your clean-up hitter... your QB, your Kobe/LeBron/MichaelJordan. You make a hard decision based on the economics of your market [revenue, market share, mind share (I think 'Yankees' here or Manchester United)], and the economics of 'her'market [free agency so to speak].
A good leader pays for the talent that is needed to win the game, regardless of his/her own salary. It's a small person who has to earn more than his/her subordinates.
We should hope that she is the 'straw that stirs the drink' Apple has great tech product [Functional High Ground arguments notwithstanding], now they need to convert/maintain/extend that into great consumer product. Angela is being asked to do that. And Tim/Apple can't afford underperforming in that position.
Nope:
$73M payout to Angela Ahrendts reflects the Burberry stock she sacrificed, explains Apple
http://tinyurl.com/qf775zo
From Wiki: "When Ahrendts was working at Burberry, the family lived in a 12,000 square feet (1,100 m2) home on an 8 acres (3.2 ha) plot west of London.
Venus surely.
If you were in their position would you expect to justify your income to random people? The problem isn't with the people taking advantage of the system, it's a fundamental problem with the way wealth goes around. When we read about Apple taking 86% of the smartphone industry profits:
http://appleinsider.com/articles/14/11/04/apple-continues-to-dominate-with-massive-86-share-of-handset-industry-profits
it's great from the point of view that Apple is doing well. However, that inevitably means the 2014 revenue of $183b, net income of $39b, assets of over $100b is being assigned to people associated with Apple, mostly its shareholders, which is a small amount of people.
$12b of the revenue went to their 46,000 staff (heavily weighted to top staff of course) and maybe some of the $6b in R&D.
There isn't an easy solution for this. As your example pointed out, someone lived for 10 years, smoking, playing games and watching anime on a far smaller income. Taking that person's disability out of the consideration, healthy people would do the same. That's not necessarily a bad thing but not everyone thinks that's a good way to live. Elon Musk was asked about holidays and he said that he gets bored pretty quickly if he goes to the beach for too long.
For a lot of these people, their job is like playing games and watching TV. In that sense it's best that they get most of the income because regardless of the income, it won't disincentivize them to contribute. If you gave a great salary to a low-level employee who had to deal with annoying customers all day, they wouldn't last in that job role very long. I think this would be a positive thing for people as a whole as it means a higher quality of living but it could easily lead to a shortage of staff for menial jobs if it's not done the right way.
There is a very clear problem and even the people at the top are concerned by it:
http://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2015/jan/22/davos-oligarchs-fear-inequality-global-elite-resist
http://www.project-syndicate.org/commentary/paul-polman-and-lynn-forester-de-rothschild-call-on-companies-and-governments-to-unite-in-the-search-for-an-inclusive-and-sustainable-economy
"Just 80 individuals now have the same net wealth as 3.5 billion people – half the entire global population. Last year, the best-off 1% owned 48% of the world’s wealth, up from 44% five years ago. On current trends, the richest 1% will have pocketed more than the other 99% put together next year. The 0.1% have been doing even better, quadrupling their share of US income since the 1980s."
These numbers include developing countries where earnings are very low but also living costs differ. Plus it's really muddled because of stocks and shares. Jeff Bezos has a net worth of around $30b and yet his company makes no profit. Cash and other tangible assets have been obfuscated so much that there's no clear picture of what wealth is going where. If you started a company, split it into 1000 shares, sold 999 shares for $1 and the last share for $1b, your company could be valued at $1 trillion but the $1 trillion doesn't exist, it's just a valuation and yet it can be used to manipulate other assets and would count in income comparisons. It would likely have to be more shares than that but this happened with Elon Musk recently where Google invested $1b for 10% of SpaceX. A single trade that valued SpaceX at $10b. Last year it was valued at $4-5b.
The link above suggests that taxation is the way forward:
"The thinking person’s Davos oligarch realises that allowing things to carry on as they are is dangerous. So some want a more “inclusive capitalism” – including more progressive taxes – to save the system from itself."
Wealthy people want to avoid taxes as much as possible because they see it as going into the pockets of politicians but the reality is that politicians take a very small amount. Most gets spent on jobs in education, the military, healthcare and so on. But nobody wants the government taking their earnings to give to people to live comfortably on welfare and that caused the problems in France where wealthy people moved out of France to avoid the 75% tax rate on the wealthy.
The debt problem needs to be tackled - housing debt, education debt. Credit cards and other loans are voluntary but everyone needs a home and it benefits everyone if people are sufficiently educated. Nowadays students are coming out of universities and colleges saddled with on average $26k of debt:
http://www.forbes.com/sites/specialfeatures/2013/08/07/how-the-college-debt-is-crippling-students-parents-and-the-economy/
It takes a lot of money to take on a mortgage and a significant portion is on interest - you could end up paying double what a home is worth. All the while wages aren't increasing to combat inflation so living costs go up.
Some people like to think it will all sort itself out if nobody interferes but that's obviously not happening because the man-made system is promoting wealth accumulation at the top and debt accumulation at the bottom and the financial services industry is screwing everyone because it has too much control. Eventually that system will keep income diverging and if you were to take it to an extreme level where 80 people owned 95% of the world's assets and income, leaving 5% for the rest, it should be obvious to anyone that this is unsustainable.
I personally wouldn't address it with taxation because that deprives wealthy people of assets, which they resist. I would make it a requirement that people with large cash income invest in property and allow low income working class people to live in the property rent-free or with a small fee but without the same burdens as a landlord. If the tenants save up enough money, they can buy their own home without having to pay the interest. Colleges and universities should all be funded by businesses and it would be free entry but courses would be shorter and more condensed without such long breaks. Make the business-funded programs 2 years long and anything beyond that would be funded by loans or personal expenses. Businesses would help refine the courses for required skills.
I also think that there should be a law that grants all employees shares in a company based on their job role. This allows them to earn dividends on company income. They wouldn't be allowed to sell the shares, they'd just be allocated dividends while they were working for the company and the company would retain the shares when they left and they'd be non-voting shares.
Take away the debt without over-taxing the rich, incentivize the work and it should help balance things out.
The thread just wouldn't be the same without a baiting, useless comment. Thanks for doing your part.
Ok that makes tons of sense now.
Everyone needs to remember that people get paid for making the company money. Apple believes that she will make them money or they would not have given her this much. Now these are not stupid people so they know that customers will respond to what she does. Meaning, it is the consumer that buys Apple products and brings them profits. So don't begrudge what she is doing or making. It is only made possible by all the millions of people who buy the products. It is the consumer that is responsible for these outrageous salaries and benefits.