SARGE@startrek.website 2 days ago
Lol nvidia CEO couldn’t do my job for an hour.
I am absolutely confident that I could do his job for an hour.
The empty chair in his office does his job just as easily, too.
You can tell me all about the meetings and deals they have to worry about but ultimately, by the time a company gets that large, it could run itself without a c-suite for quite some time.
This must be the 10th time I comment this on Lemmy and you might already know this, but:
The reason a CEO gets paid what he gets paid is not because of the value he adds to the company (as you pointed out, anyone could do the job), but because when the company fucks up (whether due to his decisions, or those of the board, or just anything, really), he takes the fall so the company can keep on doing whatever shady shit they’re doing and the board can act like they had no idea what was going on.
The reason a CEO gets paid what they get paid is that they also sit on the boards of other companies and vote for the compensation packages of their CEOs, who also sit on the board of the CEO’s company. It’s literally a circlejerk.
That helps, but largely the boards consist of major shareholders, or people that the shareholders have elected to be there.
The board, representing the shareholders, needs to make sure the company maximizes shareholder value above all else. They steer the company in very broad strokes. But if the company does something illegal or highly unpopular, the board members want themselves, the shareholders and the company in general to be as insulated as possible. So the CEO is a sacrificial lamb who either resigns or is fired, and takes the golden parachute. The idea is that the CEO was at fault and everything’s gonna be better now (no it’s not lol)
And what kind of job do you think those shareholders do?
They are CEOs of other companies.
I don’t think I’ve seen enough CEOs take responsibility.
I know one CEO who took full responsibility … in the back.
It’s not that they take responsibility, but rather in extreme circumstances they take the plunge and resign, or they’re fired. So the company can say they’re turning a new leaf
Examples from a quick search:
Hank McKinnell, CEO of Pfizer, received a US$188 million severance package after his resignation, even after a 44% decline in the company’s stock value since he took over in 2001.
Jeff Smisek, the former CEO of United Airlines, received a separation payment of $4.875 million in cash along with additional equity awards and other benefits for a total of close to $37 million.
United was in the middle of a corruption scandal and of course he took the fall, but I’m 100% sure he wasn’t acting alone.
Shady companies are always gonna be shady. But they’ll oust a CEO every now and then to pretend like they’re gonna change.
Does it need that much pay for someone to take the fall?
I feel like, of that’s the primary or sole motivator to pay so much, you could get someone “to take the fall in such rare cases” for much less.
I’d certainly be willing to for 2 mil. I don’t need millions for years and then a multi-million severance package.
Nvidia CEO couldn’t do my job for an hour, and I work in tech
I never even had a manager who could do my job, let alone a CEO.
Hour to hour and day to day that’s probably true. But, nVidia is actually an example of a company where their leadership made some smart decisions decades ago by understanding their market extremely well and correctly predicting what was going to be happening in the industry 5-10 years down the line. For example, he went all in on CUDA almost a decade before the AI went mainstream, and because of that decision, nVidia is the biggest company in the world today.
I would bet that if a major decision came up and you had to decide whether or not to go all in on X, you couldn’t actually do his job.
The_v@lemmy.world 2 days ago
Very large companies run themselves by inertia alone… until the c-suite fucks it up trying to make more money.