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Comment by anonu | Hacker News Reader

> painting him as a fairly classic example of a celebrity CEO whose real expertise is looting the companies he runs

I don't see that. Most press commends him for turning around Nissan and Renault.

He may have gotten greedy. His downfall was more due to social norms. Greed is perceived in a good light in the USA. Greed is a cardinal sin in Japan. (I'm generalizing)

Ghosn probably felt he should have taken the GM job when Obama offered it to him. His counterpart there was easily making more than he was despite all the financial engineering he had to do to get what he viewed as fair compensation

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And its not the first Gaijin CEO In Japan, to get in trouble when he rocked to boat.

Though all countries look askance at "them furniners" eg The HP / Autonomy Trial.

TLDR for HP/Autonomy ?

I think it’s a gross oversimplification to say that greed is perceived in a good light in the USA. Financial inequality and the ever-widening gap between CEO pay and worker pay is a contentious subject in the USA as elsewhere.

That being said, nobody does anything about it in the USA for various reasons, and I’ll accept that the USA is certainly one of the easier places in the world to get away with egregious greed.

I employed a fair bit of hyperbole in my previous comment, so take it with a grain of salt.

Japan and France, where Ghosn was CEO of 2 companies, have strict compensation caps for executives. In the USA there is no such thing. The cultural perception of making a lot of money is different in Japan and France vs USA.

> In the USA there is no such thing.

That's not strictly true. There is a tax code provision that prohibits companies from counting executive compensation of over $1MM as an operating expense, the intention being to discourage high compensation by essentially putting an additional tax on the excess compensation. It's not very effective, particularly since "performance-based" compensation was exempt until a couple years ago.

There are also harder limits for executive (and other people's) compensation in government contracting. Somewhat more effective than the above, but still not great.

What are the caps on France? The top CEOs are paid several tens of millions of euros. The limits are cultural to some extend, but I do not know of any legal ones (for private companies, the public ones do have legal caps)

It's that old Gordon Gekko trope that everyone takes as gospel here. I don't think Gordon was really a hero in that movie, but I beg to differ with other interpretations.

I don't understand this gap issue.

Japan, CEO gets paid $1 million a year. Engineer makes $60k

USA, CEO gets paid $100 million a year. Engineer makes $300k

I much prefer the higher paid CEO as he's paying me 5x what my Japanese counterpart gets paid.

On top of which in Japan I have to grovel up to my CEO and speak to them like royalty using super groveling language where as the CEO in the USA can call by their first name and treat them as just another person.

>Greed is perceived in a good light in the USA.

Yeah! That's why Martin Shkrelli was so admired as a national hero in the U.S.

...right?

I can't think of a single place on this planet where greed is admired, unless you want to over-generalize and lump in general capitalism and entrepreneurship -- but I think that the effort to over-define greed into any and all wealth accumulation is missing the actual point behind the concept of greed itself.

Lots of downvotes, but this comment is essentially correct. I have never seen an American business mag lionize an executive for their "greed", for example. Innovation, vision, boldness, etc. etc. It may all be B.S., but it's not saying "this executive, he's so greedy, isn't that great?!"

Greed is not perceived as negatively in the U.S. as in, for example, Japan, but it is not, here or anywhere I am aware of, perceived "in a good light". When you want to suck up to an executive in the U.S., you don't commend them on how "greedy" they are, because (in the U.S. like anywhere else), that's an insult.

Naked greed is perceived badly, because it's frankly rather lower class.

But cut-throat monopolistic market domination, gaming, and consumer/employee abuse - that's just sound business ethics.

I think what you are missing is that "greed" is in the eye of the beholder. Of course a business magazine never worships the "greed" of a great businessperson, but they do worship a person's ability to make huge deals.

America definitely worships actions that many would consider to fall under the "greed" term, even if you don't. A great example is that Donald Trump's main qualification for being President was his wealth and business acumen. I think half the country would consider him a poster child for "greed" while the other half think his actions fit in on a resume.

Your comment does a lot of mental gymnastics to avoid calling stealing, stealing and a crime, crime.

Americans don’t view greed positively, we are too busy trying to survive a rigged system without falling victim to some financially crippling life event.

At the personal level, I don't think many value greed as a virtue. The only people who do this explicitly to my knowledge are the descendants of Rand's Objectivism, of which our Fed chair of many years, Alan Greenspan, was definitely an adherent. His chairmanship had ushered in a new culture of vulture capital in the 80s and we're only now catching up on how dystopian it all is.

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