As for Musk - he didn’t get Tesla to pay him anything. Shareholders voted and approved this compensation package, twice. When he was given the package initially many years ago, it was worth a lot less. Musk led the company through a 20x gain in value which is why it is worth more now. Shareholders got far more than they ever imagined. But even the targets they set out initially were considered impossible by most, and it was thought to be a very risky deal for Musk and great for everyone else, since he received no cash.
// Shareholders voted and approved this compensation package, twice. // Just because shareholders voted for it doesn't' mean it's not a big fat waste of money. While we're on the subject, how about Musk paying 2x the real value of Twitter?
// ure there are some packages that are irresponsible but usually there’s a good reason they are what they are, //
And again, most of what is pilloried as "government waste" usually has a good reason too. To suggest otherwise is hyperbole.
// simply don’t understand hiring for those kinds of roles
chuckle let me tell you a story about the time I made $25 million in one all-nighter :-) I was working in Manhattan, for a very well-known financial firm. One day I noticed that one of our regulatory filings was going to be late. I told my boss and he said not to worry about it. So I escalated it to his boss--who also told me not to worry about it.
I figured that I could regenerate the report and submit it on time, but only if I worked all night. So I did. I was just finishing up at about 8:30am, when the president came to my desk and said "THANKYOU so much for submitting that report!" I thought great--I finally caught the attention of the execs.
He came around again at 5:00pm and thanked me again. I thought wow, I'm in.
The next day they fired him :-) Turns out, he had a $25 million golden parachute--and one of the conditions was that there were no late regulatory filings....so I worked all night, and he got $25 million.
But wait!!! There's more!! in 24 hours, I had gone from the president's favorite--to being the guy who just cost the company $25 million. You can't really fire somebody for obeying the law, but you sure can gaslight the shirt out of them. I eventually had to quit, and I'm still looking for a job.
Don't tell me in those condescending tones that I don't know what those bonuses are for. And again, if you think the private sector is some uniformly wonderful example of efficiency you are the one who is out of touch with what goes on in the C-suite.
If they were as wasteful as you said and as willing to give out such bonuses they wouldn't have cared, but you yourself said they did.
In the end the private sector wants to make money, that includes clawing back bonuses promised to execs etc, they want to save money however they can. The same can't be said for the public sector. That makes them entirely different.
Not at all, and sorry if I gave that impression. I only wrote what I know and saw. I don't know anything more than that.
> You just provided evidence that private companies work hard to not pay execs those bonuses to save money, that goes directly against what you are arguing.
Surely you are not equating cheating with efficiency? And surely you aren't suggesting that nobody in government ever cheats :-)
It is very likely that unaccounted-for money wasn't lost so much as diverted to black budget projects.
You are trying to conflate organizations that aim to make money, and do it so efficiently that the organization-owners can buy those things with the proceeds, with what this person is talking about, which are inefficient organizations that do not aim to make money. There is no overlap.
For that matter if the inefficient organizations in question were more efficient (required fewer tax revenues to function well), there would be net more yachts, not fewer.
the waste in the private sector is nothing compared to the public sector. you have no idea.
> Elon Musk just got Tesla to pay him $50 billion. For what, exactly?
for this: https://fortune.com/2021/03/16/elon-musk-net-worth-tesla-sto...
Does anyone have an idea? I hear this so much but I’ve never seen hard numbers on it.
Individually they don't seem so bad, but it's death by a thousand cuts with these things.
And that one costs more than the numbers shown. The process to get security clearances can take 12 months or more, time when people may not be able to work on whatever they were hired for, or they may quit rather than sit twiddling their thumbs for a mediocre salary.
https://www.gao.gov/reports-testimonies - lots of reports here
You hear about musk getting 4/50 billion, you say, oh well, its what the shareholders voted for...
You hear about stuff that happens in government---yeah, that's what the voters voted for too.
Even any fraud which happens: the voters are the one's who determined how much funding the watchdog departments get. But watchdog departments are expensive too, so you've got to trade off.
Everybody hates the government but loves their congressman. Probably because he's saying that he's cutting government waste. But if we keep electing the same congressmen over and over, decade after decade, thing's won't change.
Another example of DOD waste is in hiring if clearances are required and the new hire doesn't already have one. Because of the problems in the current clearance system it can take 12 months to get a clearance, being very generous that's $200k to have someone sitting at a desk twiddling their thumbs. If there are only 1000 new hires across DOD without clearances every year (and there are more) that's just $200 million wasted paying salaries but getting no value from them. Every year. Again, the real number of new hires without clearances is a lot higher than that.
That's one reason I chose the example I did. The project is late, it's forced them to maintain (for hundreds of millions of dollars) the system it will replace, and the clearance process is taking close to a year for many, if not most, new hires. The total cost of this new system being late is billions of dollars, not just the $1.3 billion or whatever they directly measured for it. For an IT system.
And this is common in DOD IT system acquisitions and sustainment. Each one of these would bankrupt a medium-sized business (without VC money if they thought it could be a unicorn) if it didn't have the DOD infinite cash backing.
Other than the absolute largest, highest profit margin companies (with cash to burn) no private business can be this inefficient.
I hate that there is not way for me too tell whether you are even real or not. This business of having computers which can pass the Turing test really has its disadvantages.
Paying somebody $200k? I think it should be obvious that a spy who slipped in because of weak vetting cost the U.S. more than $200k...an hour. E.G. a harpoon-class cruise missile costs almost $2 million---and compromised intelligence could have us firing one of those off at innocent people. E.G. the second gulf war and "weapons of mass destruction" We could have saved a couple of trillion dollars.
What a remarkable misrepresentation of what I wrote.
I don't want us to spend less (necessarily) I want us to waste less and spend effectively. If you aren't just trolling and really don't understand that, then I'm honestly surprised you successfully found and clicked the reply button.
And since your reading comprehension is so bad, the $200k is not their pay, their pay is likely around $60-90k/year. The $200k was total cost to keep someone sitting in a desk producing nothing for a year, and a lowball. Quite frequently what happens, in high COL areas especially, they sit there for a year, get a Secret or TS clearance, and then bounce to a contractor for 2-4x the pay. US tax payers get nothing for it, but got to spend at least $60k on salary, another $30k on benefits, another $30-50k in other overhead, and $50k or more on the security clearance process itself. And in the end the position the person was hired for is vacant, has to be filled again, and the process repeats.
This is not effective, it is not efficient, it's just wasteful.
sigh and I don't like it either. I miss the days, not long ago, when if something was making reasonably grammatical and coherent sentences, that mean it was a person.
One of the broader points is that government waste and private sector waste look different. We would like organizations to provide services at cost (or as close to at cost as possible) to consumers. That’s zero waste. Profits are waste (arguably a necessary evil, but a waste from the consumer’s perspective). Paying people to do nothing is waste.
One of the promises of the private sector is they can keep costs low by innovating on the product, figuring out ways to make it faster and cheaper. But very often that’s hard, or not possible, or not convenient. So they “innovate” on price or market position instead. Tacit collusion, enshittification, monopolization, cartel behavior, acquahires, shrinkflation, etc. are all symptoms of private sector waste. Not innovation.