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Comment by avianlyric | Hacker News Reader

It’s shares and Apple’s market cap is 2.44 Trillion. Effectively shareholders paid 0.03cents on the dollar for Tim Cook. In exchange they get a steady ship that slowly and surely increases in value.

Why quibble about such a small amount? You’ve paid 0.03% of your current Apple holdings for a decade of growth creating value many orders of magnitude greater.

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> Why quibble about such a small amount?

I am not quibbling about THAT amount.

I am quibbling about the fact that he (like other tycoons) sits on top of a giant pyramid of human labor, the majority of which earns just enough to make ends meet in a low cost of living country.

Sure, Tim Cook is a good person and deserves reward for what he has done and it should be "a hellava lot". At some point, however, that reward starts becoming absurd and nonsensical.

Market cap is not a real sum of money that actually exists and coupd be retrieved. You, the sharegolder, oan the company, and pay Tim Cook out of revenue. From that perspective salaries of upper management are not so trivial

Apple's 2020 revenue was 274 bn $, and on track to substantially increase in 2021. Tim Cook's compensation is about < 0.3% of that revenue.

Then again, I'm not sure it makes more sense to compare stock-based compensation with revenue than with market cap.

It can’t be retrieved in one go. But provided every shareholder doesn’t try to liquidate their position simultaneously, then it’s a reasonable metric to use for determining how much shareholder value was lost when Tim was granted the shares.

Disregarding market cap as not real money would be like disregarding your checking account as not real because the bank operates a fractional reserve.

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