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Comment by username223 | Hacker News Reader

> I think there are very, very few people who are worth $100m,

I'm not saying you're wrong, but I'm highly skeptical that one person would be worth, say, $99m more than a very-well-paid engineer, or $50m more than someone too rich to care about money other than as a way of keeping score, in just a few years. Rockstar executives get crazy money even when they run companies into the ground (see Meyer, Marissa) or merely keep them afloat (Tillerson, Rex). I suspect rockstar engineers are getting a bit of the same treatment, which has little to do with differences in performance among those making more than a small multiple of average pay.

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The mistake you're making is in thinking there is some objective definition of "value" - as in, there is some all-seeing entity which knows everything and knows exactly what a person "should" be paid.

I would argue that that's a fundamentally incorrect way of looking at it. You're "worth" whatever you can negotiate for (making baseline assumptions about not defrauding people).

If you can convince someone to pay you 10 million dollars to mow his lawn, I think you deserve every penny.

After thinking about it a while, I think part of the numbers come from a time-based valuation.

Apple's chief council is likely not the only lawyer who could 'do his job' for that price. But I need someone to do his job this afternoon, no, now. Who has all the relevant information in their head so they can give me an informed opinion based on the entire company's operations and positions about a $10B decision that must be made by the end of the day. Go find me that person. How much would you pay to have that person here and now today rather than tomorrow to guide whether the price should be $21B or $18B for the deal.

I think you may be missing the point with examples of execs who got paid a ton of money even for mediocre or poor performance. The reason they got paid so much is that decisions at that level are absolutely "billion dollar decisions", in that the performance of the executive, and the executive alone, can be the difference between a super successful company and a failure. That is one reason why execs are paid so much - going in to the deal boards are betting that their execs will be one of the successful ones, not one of the failing ones.

The same is true for "rock star" engineers. I absolutely believe there are a few engineers who can make the difference between being wildly successful or being an also ran. To use a well known related example, consider Jony Ive. I believe that his unique design talents have been responsible for billions of dollars in value to Apple shareholders.

Price is what you pay, value is what you get.

The price may very well exceed the average engineer. However, the value to Google in incentivizing such leaders to drive product development with 100~1000% ROI is that much higher and it's crazy that they have so much cash to do be able to do this.

So if I pay you $100 million to make a product and I have a very high likelihood of flipping it for $10 billion for a 100x return, it makes sense why a market for such talent exists at Google.

If you think about how large Google is and the amount of innovation that the market expects from them along with the pressure from Microsoft, Amazon, Facebook etc, $50~200 million is a premium they will gladly pay because this in turn would put pressure on other competitors.

Lyft simply would not be able to match Google's offer of $100 million. This is how Google and Microsoft wins most of the time. Cash.

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