Coinbase’s chief product officer will leave with a $105M payday
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BS in CS at Kharagput, something like a US T2 university
MS in CS at Buffalo, something like a T2 univeristy,
Spend some years at IBM and Oracle as a developer/senior developer 200k/year ?
MIT Sloan MBA T1 world class
PM/Senior PM at Symantec for a year 200-300k/year?
Head of Payment products India at Google, 8 years rising though the ranks 300-500k/year?, did an externship of 2 years at flipkart as SVP
Then back to google as a VP 500-1.5MM/year?
CPO at coinbase made 150 million.
It looks like he moved around, leveraging his title to get senior roles between start-up and well-established companies:
PM at small company to PM at big company,
Head of product at big company to SVP at startup
SVP at startup to VP at big company
VP of big company to C-suite at startup pre-IPO
Most of all, he got in on the crypto gravy train right in time for his options to balloon
Small companies like the brand names, but you can take big steps up in title in the small companies and startups.
I did it myself, though it was accident of history rather than being planned.
>Spend some years at IBM and Oracle as a developer/senior developer 200k/year
65-100k maybe less.
>PM/Senior PM at Symantec for a year 200-300k/year?
150k max.
Oracle, IBM and Symantec do not pay as well as FAANG and you need to adjust for the time. They also colluded to suppress wages.
But he did navigate the valley. Seems like a cool guy to get to know and I'd read his autobiography.
Andrew Fastow, former CFO of Enron, became a document review clerk after serving his jail sentence. But five years later he became something called a "Principal" for an analytics company called KeenCorp.
So, if you are out of luck, you postpone that $5M waterfront summer home purchase, go sit on some board for symbolic money, sniff around, and eventually join some hot startup when you and your buddies found another investor cow to milk.
Not having to commit your time to a shitty offer in order to pay your bills right now makes a killing.
This is especially common during a downturn, when there's less money to go around for people who are "inspiring", but can't "roll up their sleeves" or earn the respect of those who do.
Depending on how long you've been in the industry, it might be because your sample size falls within the anomalous period of 2001-2022. Expect to see a bunch of ex-tech directors opening bakeries, breweries, consulting/"life-coaching" practices, etc.
I don't think I'd call it falling downwards, more like surfing tangentially. It's still a pretty comfortable and fulfilling life, but I wouldn't describe it as up, up & away.
[edit] this is pretty hard to disambiguate from the "fuck you money" types described by a sibling commenter, superficially, but there is a wide distribution of net worths in this group.
There's going to be a whole lot of people who peak with some fancy-sounding title at a no-name company. Then they fade into a vaguely-comfortable (but definitely not rich) obscurity where they can't fully retire — but they sort of drift along with occasional consulting gigs, or writing a niche Substack, or getting really into baking sourdough bread, or some other such nihilistic affectations.
In the grand scheme of things, it still beats having to get a real job.
His big break was heading up mobile search ad revenue task force at the time mobile traffic was growing like crazy. Big oppty and he was up to the task. It's hard to say he really succeeded at flipkart, google shopping, and coinbase. Each of those were 2 year or less stints.
This is the kind of BS MBAs say to each other.
I can spot (maybe unintentional) ambiguity from a mile away. Whose backs were broken, and who did the work.
What would be an example of a new product that will help the company thrive?
> We have seven new non-crypto products in our 2023 roster, which includes fixed deposits, ETFs [exchange-traded funds], mutual funds, stocks, bonds and U.S. equities.
> The goal is to be the one-stop wealth-tech destination for every Indian. As we diversify into other asset classes, there are different business models we are experimenting with to check which is the best for customers. There are multiple partnerships in place since we are launching such large-scale assets onto our platform. [Editor’s note: CoinSwitch declined to give the names of partners or detail on licenses obtained to sell non-crypto products.]
> We started off with a mission to make money equal for all. Crypto was the starting point for us but we will continue to innovate towards being a wealth tech platform. We see crypto as an investment class that is offered alongside other assets, to help users build a diversified portfolio.
Ref: https://forkast.news/indias-coinswitch-exchange-looks-to-non...
Now they're ending with a mission to make money equal for wealthy people.
The same, really. The DeFi revolution in 2 phrases.
Coinbase Recipies: Cooking recipes stores and exchanged on the blockchain.
Coinbase Ponzi: Turnkey service to create, launch and list your new tokens. Whitepaper generated through partnership with ChatGPT. A16Z investment guaranteed.
Imagine if they'd followed FTX and doubled down on perps and options.
It's like the folks who joined Amazon a few years ago as Staff engineers. Their original comp packages were valued at $200k-$300k per year, but then the stock took off, and they ended up with $1M+ per year. They started with a typical package that was stock heavy and got lucky.
Interestingly the people getting in now are getting screwed for the same reason -- with the stock dropping, their comp package is getting cut in half.
The people getting in now aren’t screwed, they can just ask for refreshers. But the previous batch certainly got an unexpected windfall.
To give these figures a bit of shape. This is like getting a smarties cake[3] and giving Surojit Chatterjee pretty much the entire cake for just a couple years work. Whereas the median worker gets, for working a lifetime of effort (~45 years) about a quarter of a single smartie.
I'm not saying that everyone should earn the same but rather I would question this gap which continues to grow. This sort of payout is not aspirational IMHO but rather a symbol of a deeply dysfunctional society.
[1] https://bfi.uchicago.edu/insight/research-summary/lifetime-e... [2] I made some crass assumptions on top of these figures to make it easier for me to calculate, but its representative. [3] https://i.pinimg.com/originals/72/e8/fb/72e8fbf7cf48f45db6d8...
Goal: Stop overpaying top staff or increase the pay of your lowest workers, including commonly outsourced positions such as janitorial staff.
To fix it you'd have to do something like break it up into component parts:
1) Voting rights
2) Capital ownership (liquidation rights)
3) Dividend rights (aka profit sharing, pensions plans, and the like)
As well as expand the use of bonds for fundraising (including at the startup funding steps).
It will never happen due to entrenched interests (one of which is very importantly the right of legislators to own shares in companies).
I don't know. It could happen in privately owned corporations, employee owned corporations, or if shareholders of a particular company get mad about the huge payouts to fly-by-night executives. But it's unlikely.
Coinbase' last private round valuation was ~8B[1]. On its DPO day, the stock closed at ~340, giving it a valuation of ~80B, or a 10x increase in ~18 months. Options literally skyrocketed and given the time value of options, they would have been worth far more if traded directly vs a simple exercise and sell. How will you design maximum wage laws in a case where something is shooting up 10-15x in value? Rather, what we have today (progressive taxation) seems to be a right setup with some tuning needed to balance the treatment of capital gains vs wages.
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/funding_round/coinbase-series-f--...
The stock is down -84.99% from IPO, seems like so far (accordingly shareholders and the financial market), the product is indeed not very successful because if it was, the price would go up, not down.
So he did a poor job, and now when sold his part of it, he got $105M.
Or (at least partially) the surrounding market conditions have changed into unfavorable conditions for a company like Coinbase
Should a product officer be judged on whether the economy/financial markets change their mind on the value of risky things like crypto?
Plus the FTX thing most likely isn't a product officer's fault
Yes, absolutely. The whole point of product management is to find sustainable locations in the product space to create lasting value.
People have been warning for years that the rise of crypto was unsustainable, a grift supported by locating dumb people with dollars to cash out the people who had large supplies of magic beans to sell them.
It's not like FTX was an outlier. FTX was the largest and most spectacular failure so far. But it's part of a rich tradition of crime, grift, and plain old collapse going back at least to Mt Gox in 2014. And it's part of a large network of other failures and soon-to-be failures: https://www.mollywhite.net/etc/ftx-contagion
Yes, you can see Coinbase price appears to be highly correlated with Bitcoin price.
However it is clear that Coinbase has still done very poorly: BTC is down 63% and COIN is down 84% since the IPO.
One primary goal in a capitalist society is to maximise your own earnings, at whatever level you are playing the game. Most people seem to play this game to some extent (almost certainly if you are involved with a software startup). Most people seem to get very annoyed when someone plays it better than they do. Most natural born Americans are also blind to the fact that they get a massive head start at the capitalism game just from the luck of being born in the USA, which gives a huge number of handicap advantages.
Surojit Chatterjee mentions his background in the blogpost he wrote when he gained the position at Coinbase: “Growing up in India in a poor middle class household”[1]. That cuts out the usual baloney excuse of being born into wealth.
It is just as unfair that the median person in the USA gets to spend $65/day (@2017) while the median person in Mexico gets to spend $10/day[2] ($100M$ is a difference in order, not a difference in kind). I met people in Vietnam working for $50 per month, when a developer in the USA could easily be on $5000 per month, a 100x difference. 33M$ per year is 100x a Google developer at $300k, so we can find examples where the differences are proportional.
We can question whether the rules of the game of capitalism are sensible for society, but there is not much to be gained by saying “not fair” when somebody plays the game extremely well.
He was employed as Chief Product Officer in February 2020, and the Coinbase IPO on April 14 2020.
A capitalist question is: did the VCs receive more than $100M by employing him? IPO valued Coinbase at $99.6bn, so if he managed to increase the IPO price by somewhat more than 0.1%, then the VCs would be in the money, which is all a good wee capitalist really cares about. I would guess him doing his actual job would make zero difference to the IPO (one month is not enough time to develop the product significantly). It would be interesting to know what they were negotiating: the financial incentives they gave him were more “pump-and-dump” rather than work hard to build product. Pump-and-dump may have been aligned with the VC objectives of getting a wildly good IPO (depending on details of non-trading periods etcetera).
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-beginnings-surojit-chatte...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...
I'm getting 39% and 55% figures for job-offer negotiations. While that's not the only way people try to maximize earnings, if people leave this on the table it's less likely they're picking something else up off the table.
1) https://www.cnbc.com/2018/02/08/only-39-percent-of-workers-n...
2) https://www.prnewswire.com/news-releases/survey-55-percent-o...
WRT what else you wrote: Extractive capitalism is one of the reasons for the purchasing power differentials (as well as what's available to purchase) around the world. People can be angry at this sort of thing while still trying to build an adequate lifestyle. And monetary compensation doesn't cover everything, even in a hypercapitalist society.
I've noticed that the most famous people who started out poor tend to be famous for becoming rich. Not all of them, but most of them. Whereas those who were born relatively wealthy tend to become famous for a lot of things.
It is similarly “unfair” that the median person in the USA gets to spend $65/day (@2017) while the median person in Mexico gets to spend $10/day[2] ($100M$ is a difference in order, not a difference in kind). I met people in Vietnam working for $50 per month, when a developer in the USA could easily be on $5000 per month, a 100x difference. (100M$/3) per year is 100x a Google developer at $300k, so we can find examples where the differences are proportional.
One primary goal in a capitalist society is to maximise your own earnings, at whatever level you are playing the game of capitalism. Most people seem to play this game to some extent (almost certainly if you are involved with a software startup). Most people seem to get very annoyed when someone plays capitalism far better than they do. Most natural born Americans are also conveniently blind to the fact that virtually all Americans get a massive head start at the capitalism game just from the luck of being born in the USA, which gives a huge number of handicap advantages to citizens brought up there.
A good capitalist question is: did the VCs receive more than $100M by employing him? (edit: $600M?) IPO valued Coinbase at $99.6bn, so if he managed to increase the IPO price by somewhat more than 0.1%, then the VCs would be in the money, which is all that good wee venture capitalists should really care about. (Edit: ~0.6% because VCs gave up approximately that much worth of shares at IPO? I would guess the options were not worth $600M: I strongly suspect people making up numbers based on share price and ignoring exercise dates).
He was employed as Chief Product Officer in February 2020, and the Coinbase IPO on April 14 2020. I would guess him doing his actual job would make negligible difference to the IPO (one month is not enough time to develop the product significantly). It would be interesting to know what they were negotiating, given that the IPO process must have been in finalisation stages. The financial incentives they gave him were more pump-and-dump rather than work-hard-to-build-a-product. Pump-and-dump may have been very aligned with the VC objectives of getting a wildly valuable IPO (although it depends on details of non-trading periods, exercise dates, and structure etcetera).
Surojit Chatterjee mentions his background in the blogpost he wrote when he gained the position at Coinbase: “Growing up in India in a poor middle class household”[1]. That cuts out the usual baloney excuse of being born into wealth, and also points out he had the extra serious handicap of not being born into a wealthy country.
Nothing I have written above should be surprising, yet so many of the comments here seem to ignore the facts.
I strongly believe we can and should question whether the rules of the game of capitalism are sensible for society. However I also think there is little to be gained by saying “unfair” when somebody plays the extremely well (certainly wildly better than I) given the hand they were dealt, and the rules (written and unwritten) as they are.
[1] https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/new-beginnings-surojit-chatte...
[2] https://ourworldindata.org/grapher/daily-median-income?tab=t...
And if the answer is "yes, but not just to this degree"...what about relatively speaking? If country X has GDP of Y...is the ratio of executive fleecing that happens in America comparable to any other country?
This is a class issue, not a "seize the opportunity" issue.
1) Originally giving large amount of stock to the C-suite was seen as a way of locking in the motives of executives to enrich the corporation (or at least bump the share price), not just themselves.
2) They stayed okay with it, and even increased the options, because it was now standard practice. And if they didn't okay it they wouldn't get the 'best' executives.
The problem with all of this is that some shareholders are longer-term holders than others. And if executives are jumping ship to get a higher payout every couple of years, then they are only incentivized to boost the share price for those couple of years (or until their options mature). So executive's motivations are only in sync with the best monetary interests of short-term shareholders.
You'd think the shareholders would design compensation policies to encourage long-term executive retention and thus long-term "shareholder value", but this doesn't seem to be the case.
Hoping to become part of the owning class instead of the working class.
Yet this will never happen for the vast, vast majority. But please worship PG some more.
Anyway now seems like a great opportunity for companies to experiment with 4-day workweeks, whether 40 hours (better than nothing) or 32 hours.
in US dollars and not in crypto-baloney, let us add.
https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/baloney
I happen to be from Italy, btw. And hate bologna.
(The sausage, or whatever it is, not the city)
Which would be unsurprising, as plenty of startups puff up expectations and take advantage of the young and naive. I have relatively little sympathy for Coinbase employees, as I think the whole thing was a scam built on scams, so it was always a question of who gets screwed. But I have some sympathy for the ones who were early enough in their careers that they didn't really have the chance to learn how rotten the world can get in spots.
2 America is something to be avoided at all cost- even the right wing parties think it is a nightmare situation
And damn, top guy got paid almost a billion. Also, the top two guys are Brigham Young alumni.
Edit: To be fair, the top guy is also the company's founder. Props to him.
I don't see what can possibly justify this kind of compensation...
Possibly part of the reason to depart? A $70M comp cut and little hope of it recovering seems a good reason
(i know i sound negative about all this but if i'm mistaken about Earn please correct me)
Especially:
https://twitter.com/VCBrags/status/1588954788334800896 and https://twitter.com/VCBrags/status/1572301007383851009
to ya tech minions - slaving every day because some higher up said jira tickets gotta be complete.
dude made more money in two years than you would have made working 10 years at coinbase as an IC.
--also edit
Stock options are a bad way to pay people. Perverse incentives - the holder of stock options doesn't take risk in the way a normal way a stockholder does. a stock option holder isn't there for the long term.
if I had a company - you won't get stock options. you will get decent pay. and loan to buy company stock at public prices
https://www.linkedin.com/pulse/reflecting-my-crypto-web3-jou...
Maybe these people absolutely no heart at all but I'd be a tiny bit surprised if he actually mentioned his mothers death and father getting Alzheimer's as the reason for leaving when in reality he was fired.
E.g., this article from 2013: https://patch.com/virginia/oakton/what-resigning-to-spend-mo...
Or this, from 2006: https://www.nytimes.com/2006/12/23/business/23family.html
Edit : it’s not fair, we do work. Like a real job, but it feels … ethereal
> It was announced on Jan. 10, 2022 that Coinbase would be slashing its workforce by about 20% (which translates to 950 employees) in an effort to reduce overall operating expenses by 25%.
> This is the second round of layoffs for the crypto exchange, as they laid off 18% of the workforce last June as the crypto winter sets in and the space attempts to recover from the disastrous year.
why exactly is this guy getting $105m again?
Oh boy. Software engineers would be in shambles.
Guys if you hate “capital”, then maybe stop hanging out on a news website run by and started by a venture capitalists and populated by people who are either participating in or funding startups themselves.
This guy took a compensation package that both he and the company agreed to. He then sold the compensation package.
There’s no scandal here. Good for him.
Citation needed.
(I am not a lawyer).
From the article > According to the SEC, chief operating officer Emilie Choi booked $106 million in stock sales that same year.
So it's less that they overpaid him and more that all of the exec team other than Armstrong didn't believe in crypto and sold their a chunk options pretty much as they vested
Edit: I missed it the first time, but the article actually answers this: $646 million.
This has nothing to do with "product", though.
Memestocks are down ~80%. Crypto prices down ~70%. Volumes are down even more in many segments... >97% for NFTs.
Just because Coinbase was at one time valued almost 10x what it is now, doesn't mean that was the correct value - and "product" ruined it.
So he really extracted more like 2% of the value of the operations of company itself.
This is his legacy
Excluding the stock performance entirely, they've released no particularly successful or even interesting products under his tenure.
He comes from Google where he worked on ads and shopping, so honestly that tracks pretty well. Google (not Alphabet) hasn't done anything interesting or innovative in a long time now either.
If capital is planning on being this dumb, as labor I have no problem whatsoever relieving them of their monetary burdens.
This morning, I went to a bakery and ordered a blueberry muffin. It was fresh and moist and delicious. I was satisfied. If it had instead cost the same money but been dry and crumbly and had a taste of old socks, I would have considered myself to have been "ripped off". But I put no thought into the transaction, I had a wide range of acceptable outcomes, and I did almost no due diligence beforehand to ensure I was going to get the expected result.
So now, you ask:
> Why does having a contract eliminate the possibility of getting ripped off?
If transactions exist along an possibility-for-ripoff spectrum from "ordering a blueberry muffin for breakfast" to "hiring a C-level exec for X years for $YYY,YYY,YYY", then the closer you get to the latter transaction, the more specific the contract should be about expectations.
Every step along the way to having a signed contract normally involves an increased awareness of expectations by both parties. That's what the contract is. And the moment of signing a contract is an intentional decision to move forward with the transaction as specified. It's certainly possible to subvert the normal process in such a way that you obfuscate your intentions, but even then, the results of your intentions must show up in the contract language itself, or they won't count. Unless someone is holding a gun to your head, or you're not intellectually capable of entering a contractual relationship, the moment of signing your name to a contract is a moment where you are affirming that you aren't being "ripped off", that you've considered the terms and are willingly agreeing to abide by them.
Perhaps it's still possible to do all that and consider yourself to have been ripped off. And perhaps your examples are good examples of such cases. But if your board or C-level executives sign a contract for employment of a high-level executive which includes a 9-figure deal for compensation and they don't have more awareness than a poor person going to a car lot, they didn't get "ripped off", they're ripping off the investors or shareholders by collecting whatever salary they're collecting.
IANAL, also not a C-level exec, also not particularly smart about how crypto "works", but this all seems like fairly obvious stuff.
[EDIT] But perhaps it connotes differently outside American English? That could be.
How do we evaluate/measure if that is true or not?
https://knowyourmeme.com/memes/thats-just-like-your-opinion-...
In another place where "dang" couldn't be mistaken for a person, "Dang, is Coinbase collapsing?" would also be acceptable.
Remember folks: Punctuation is the difference between "Let's eat, Grandma" and "Let's eat Grandma".
(And capitalization is the difference between "I helped my Uncle Jack off a horse" and something else entirely...)
Probably the same type that associates tech debt with “company is on the decline” despite strong revenue.
Come again?
To simplify, if you depend on market X then hedging your bet means also profiting if market X collapses.
2. This product turns out to be a scam
3. His fault for trying to sell a scam
That this crook extracts $100 million for this is a symptom of a broken society.
indeed you can
Also, ask CEOs and Chief Risk Officers from financial institutions if they worry about evaporations. I am not surprised though about him walking away with the money and your comment in the crypto world.
This is pretty telling: https://dune.com/cryptuschrist/Coinbase-NFT
$482 worth of volume traded in the last 24 hours. I don't know what their fees are, but if its like OpenSea (2.5%), then they made...$12 yesterday.
All the other aspects of crypto - DeFi, NFTs, GameFi - are nice for making money but no one asked for them, and no one realy needs them.
They're fun to use and fun to gamble and play around with, but its all...useless. Especially for the existing users. DeFi, in its current form, isn't "banking the unbanked" - its just a place for the world's 1% to screw around on.
I understand the promise, but I also think the product is far, far from what the world needs or even wants.
The cheap money era is gone now though.
And anyone with a "foundation" (recall sarah palin's daughter getting paid some ridiculous amount for her :foundation" to fight teen-pregnancy after been a pregnant teen??
And then evaporated I believe and dont think she had any impact on the problem.
His major accomplishment was the Coinbase NFT marketplace and then checked out. He spent all of 2022 doing god-tier quiet-quitting.
He's not the only one whose done this: Balaji Srinivasan got hired on and did something similar with Coinbase's learning platform. Massive comp packages for executives doing C- work and still collecting atta-boys from the CEO. That guy used shareholder money to shitpost on twitter and build his personal brand.
Edit: Another thing, at least some of that shareholder money came from retail investors. Even if it's 1% it's still over a million dollars scammed from just the normal people.
Might as well treat the execs and all VCs involved to a luxurious "fuck you" dinner!
[1] https://www.crunchbase.com/organization/coinbase/company_fin...
You're right that they've already passed the bag to investors, possibly a lot of that to retail - they can all still have a nice "fuck you" dinner in their honor!
I think he beats this.
I'm part of a local YIMBY group advocating for more housing and you see some really rough stories about people who are employed, work hard, and still can't put a roof over their heads. And then you see stuff like this.
/rant
I'm fortunate to live in a country that has a social safety net.
A society that rewards its very worst people with money and power is a society on the way down.
Yes coinbase is a pretty shifty entity and probably didn't deserve so much funding in the first place but this individual managing to walk away with such an insane amount of money while making no contribution even approaching this level of value doesn't deserve praise - they're a prime example of the rot that is deeply set in America and causing wealth inequality to spiral out of control.
(I thought it was Poe's law.)
Also, let’s be honest here. It’s stock valuation. That’s basically good vibes and rich VC money. It’s not like the money came from real people.
I read that comment as sarcastic. I don't think your parent comment is praising him
It's not like he took $100M from an orphanage or something.
Most recently, I got a "legitimate" (doxxed, "real") job offer via HN, got hired and scammed, wasted hours of my time. Crypto is scamsville.
* Locked out of traditional financial industry, more people of color are turning to cryptocurrency [0]
* Why the crypto crash hit black Americans hard [1]
On the other hand blockchain and Internet ads and seemingly little else routinely get the 1-bit treatment on HN all the time: GP is going grey at the time of writing for saying roughly that crypto hurts orphans.
I don’t understand this, and since my theories about why tend to be pretty polarizing I’ll leave it at: I’m against 1-bit thinking on HN. I’m guilty of it sometimes, but I try not to be.
Edit: Misread GP with apologies. I think the larger point stands.
Are people angry at coinbase (and generally crypto exchanges) because they believe that exchanges allow vast amounts of people to speculate on the price of crypto and treat it as an investment vehicle when it was supposed to be a currency? And therefore nobody working for coinbase is capable of creating value.
Or are people angry at crypto overall because it's a wasteful cesspool and so because this guy took a product role in the crypto industry he's not capable of creating any value whatsoever so fuck him and fuck everyone that paid him?
Or are people angry with this guy because he's a bad or underwhelming product leader and the salary does not reflect the value he did bring to coinbase (perhaps you hold coinbase shares)? And therefore you feel he was somehow dishonest about his value and conned coinbase for millions and this reflects poorly on the startup/tech/vc industry?
In an environment like the USA (where many of the world's smartest tend to flock and extreme wealth is relatively achievable), being conniving is rarer than being smart, so that's what people value.
I don't think being conniving is better than being smart, just sharing an observation.
Do you disagree with the premise?
It's not what I value, it's an observation of what others value. I know people couch their own opinions in the views of others a lot, but nowhere did I express personal feelings.
It was just trying to dig one layer deeper to contextualize the situation OP was talking about (Americans valorizing confidence games).
- The world of Competition: Domination by action until one reaches a point of coldness that one loses oneself creating a "dark night of the soul" bringing change
- The world of Love: All efforts are aligned to create well being by avoiding harm of oneself and others.
If you are in the world of Competition, you will see the world in terms of black and white, gain and loss. Even my statement will be seen as a fool's position. One has to make a living in the world, even at the expense of others.
If you are in the world of Love, you will see the service you provide to others is an asset and you don't have to think about "Making it in the world", harming others at you own benefit because the world provides for you exactly what you need and you some how escape all of the consequences of others you have chosen the path of competition.
Which ever side you choose, will be the world you create for yourself and others. Right now the world of competition dominates, but it won't always be that way. Eventually we will all come-around, to love :D
Natural laws are neither cruel or kind. The are absolutely just. The cruelty of [competition] is a passing phase of evolution. - James Allen "The Competitive Laws & The Law Of Love"
AFAICT, peoples' moral leanings seem pretty consistent over history. (I could be wrong; I'm haven't studied that much history.)
1. It was a box on the sidewalk with a locked swing-out door facing forward.
2. You put coins into the machine and the door unlocks.
3. Inside are all the newspapers. You put your hand in and take only one.
4. You close the door and it locks.
The first thing my relatives asked after seeing this was "why do you only take one?"
If you model society as a Nash equilibrium, the impulse to veer towards social betrayal is present in all people and societies. It's an obvious instinct and the fact that people are so open about indulging it only indicates that we're returning to the historic mean for humans, that the trust required to have a society based on mutual cooperation is vanishing. The only galling thing here is that the people to whom the most social benefits flow -- software engineers, product managers, executives -- are so brazen about betraying it, or cheering the betrayal of others.
I don't know where you emigrated to, but unless it's Saudi Arabia or Singapore, I would doubt your observation. Americans and Euros have a tendency to view everyone else as Rousseau's "noble savage", i.e. a romanticized alien.
I personally find the mental model that includes the dynamics of dominance and subjugation along with the responses of solidarity and resistance extremely helpful in understanding the world as a whole. Why are things a certain way etc? Because of X.
It is a physics, and is more completely predictive and reliable than a mental model that sees only oppression and anxiety (as many people are limited to) or one that sees only ambition and advantage (as many peoples' blinders dictate).
Going further, I would argue that the existence of exploitation in a system is in fact essential, as is providing tools to resist and join and brace against it. But eliminating it is impossible and a non-goal.
I believe these criticisms are true of essentially everywhere on earth. How much of Germany was French for a time or a vassal state of this one lord or another? Africa, the continent that invented slavery still enslaves people to this day. The Native Americans themselves faught with one another for land and treasure. Going back far enough, we cro magnons stole neanderthal land.
The United States didn't pop into existence in 1776 bringing with it some sort absolute barbarity that previously never existed, it's the other way around, the world was pretty backward and barbaric until the Americans got around to fixing it.
FWIW the parent you are replying to was clearly jesting with some sarcasm and not actually praising it in the way you seem to think.
EDIT: apparently not, according to the other replies by that parent. But looks like several of us read sarcasm into the comment.
There are 100s of millions of people in the US.
This is an issue from the top to the bottom.
We romanticize it when it's punching up (like at a crypto company that's probably been responsible for bankrupting a whole lot of suckers) but accepting it as a virtue also lets all those terrible bosses bask in the glory of how "keen" they're being by shaving off a bit extra for the retirement fund but punching down.
if not intended as sarcastic, it works as sarcasm quite well!
I assumed the poster was being ironic.
The money was primarily generated from stock and options sales, not salary. If anything, it would be institutional investors who financed this. The fact that he happened to be on a Rule 10b5-1 plan further cements this; he didn't even control the timing of the sales.
If your company says "we're going to pay you $400,000 and a commemorative water bottle", it's hardly fleecing the company if someone else wants to pay $40M for the water bottle.
Regardless though, why would the government be better at protecting shareholder interests than... the shareholders?
Any examples to cite? Because I can't think of an example of a single company where this is true.
Usually it's a small group of shareholders that hold more than 50% of the company, making it essentially theirs as they hold a winning number of votes. They run it in a way that benefits them, placing their people on the Board of Directors, setting their goals, which the C's just follow. Sure the C's get paid well, but that's negotiated with the Board (who represents the majority shareholders).
I'll concede that sometimes, when the majority shareholder is also in the C-suite, you see more blatant "take from the company and give to myself" behavior. But as the majority shareholder it's effectively their company, and they can do what they want with what they own (basic freedoms I think we all agree on?). For example, Elon, as majority shareholder, could simply liquidate Tesla and pocket his share of the sale. It's his company.
Poorly run companies usually have a poor Board of Directors. This usually happens when the majority shareholders are short sighted and prioritize short term profit over long term growth.
I've seen situations where the company/board claws back money after a C leaves, because the C was negligent/dishonest in their doings.
In all of the above cases, the shareholders are the one's holding the cards. I can't think of a single case where the board conspired with the C's to fleece the shareholders. To do so would likely result in criminal charges.
>But as the majority shareholder it's effectively their company, and they can do what they want with what they own (basic freedoms I think we all agree on?). For example, Elon, as majority shareholder, could simply liquidate Tesla and pocket his share of the sale. It's his company.
Minority shareholder oppression is a thing.
Yeah, but minority investors know that going in. If I buy 10 shares of Google, it's unrealistic for me to think that I hold any power as a shareholder. I'm simply along for the ride.
A large investor buying say, a 25% stake in a company, while being aware of an existing 51% voting block, knows that their 25% position is a minority and does not come with significant influence.
Any investor who buys a large minority stake and later complains about not having control didn't do their homework ahead of time.
If a minority shareholder doesn't like the way the company is run they have three choices: - sell their shares and buy-in to a more attractive company - buy up a controlling interest and get their voice heard - shut their mouth and deal with it
Why should the minority opinion be allowed to overrule the majority? The majority has more skin in the game, they have more money at stake in the company.
Even at a 50 to 1 ratio of worker to exec, they can still make more money but increase the wealth of the workers at the same time.