carnegie

mikethemartian said:

Why didn’t they just settle all the issues between them in 2019 instead of leaving this matter unresolved?

Parties often resolve broader issues through settlement agreements while agreeing to leave some issues to be resolved by, e.g, further litigation. It's a way of not letting smaller - perhaps less consequential - matters hold up agreements on larger matters.

cp- said:

To anyone saying Tim deserves the money: you reckon Steve Jobs didn’t? Anyone remember how much was Steve’s Salary? $1. Yepp, a single dollar.. ߘꦬt;br>
But of course it is up to each CEO to decide to do similar stuff or get paid proportionally to how well the company is doing.

Mr. Jobs received more than $700 million in compensation, mostly in the form of Apple shares, for being CEO of Apple (after he returned). Mr. Cook has received that much plus around $1 billion more, so far, for being Apple's CEO. But Apple has made around 9 times as much in net income - more than $500 billion - during Mr. Cook's time as CEO as it did during Mr. Jobs'.

That said, shareholders generally want the (financial) interests of those running their companies (e.g. CEOs) to be aligned with their own (financial) interests. So boards aren't typically going to agree to little or no compensation for CEOs unless those CEOs already have significant (financial) interests in the companies they're running - e.g., because they already own substantial amounts of equity in the companies.

skingers said:

red oak said:

“Four Giants”.   Lol

Apple is literally 50% of BH now.  

Apple is 50% of the holdings in their equities portfolio of Brk yes, but the biggest part of their business by far is the subsidiaries they own outright.  They are a massive conglomerate of businesses that made net earnings of 90 Billion last year.  Apple paid a total of 14.5 Billion in dividends to all stockholders so Brk would have seen about 785 Million of that in 2021 for their stake.  Since they did not sell any Apple stock in 2021 that means that 89.2 Billion came from non-apple elements of Brk.  So 50% of the stocks portfolio yes, but nowhere near "50% of BH".

Berkshire's Apple holdings account for more than a third of those reported net earnings from last year.

Based on GAAP, Berkshire reports unrealized equity gains (and losses) as current earnings. That's the biggest reason its earnings are so volatile; it's something Mr. Buffett complains about.

Of the $91 billion in net earnings that Berkshire reported for 2021, around $64 billion came from investment gains - the vast majority of which were unrealized. That doesn't include interest and dividends. Around $33 billion came from unrealized Apple gains. Non-GAAP measures, not counting unrealized gains, would look quite different of course.

Over the last 3 years Berkshire has around $270 billion in reported pre-tax earnings. Its Apple holdings account for around $130 billion of those earnings. For 2020, Berkshire's earnings from its Apple holdings accounted for more than Berkshire's total reported net earnings. In other words, without its Apple-related earnings (most of which came from unrealized gains), Berkshire would have reported a pre-tax loss for the year. Again, that's because of GAAP. It wouldn't have been a fair reflection of Berkshire's businesses - though its non-equity businesses did struggle in 2020.

All that said, yes, Apple isn't really 50% of Berkshire. It represents less than half of the value of Berkshire's equity holdings and less than a quarter of Berkshire's market cap.

DAalseth said:

Wasn't there ALREADY a shareholder suit over this? Wasn't laughed out of court?

This is a consolidated case. But, yes, the judge previously dismissed all of the claims made in one of the original complaints (i.e. she dismissed claims based on a bunch of the statements which were asserted by plaintiffs to be false or misleading). What was left were claims based on two groups of statements by Mr. Cook - the so-called emerging market statements and the so-called iPhone demand statements. The judge then dismissed claims based on the latter. So all that's left at this point are claims based on Mr. Cook's so-called emerging market statements, where he said "In relation to China specifically, I would not put China in that category..."

I think this is a very weak case. It took some stretched reasoning just to get it over the rather low hurdles it needed to get over to get to this point.

fred1 said:

“. . . by a Virginia woman who not just broke into his home, . . .”
I’m curious about this from the first line of the article. How did she actually get into his home?

It seems, based on Apple's restraining order petition and the accompanying declaration of Apple's security specialist, that she didn't actually break into his house. She just got onto the property.