Activision CEO Bobby Kotick now one of America’s highest paid executives
arstechnica.com
arstechnica.com
He'd just make the list of the top 20 highest paid baseball players. $20 million is a lot of money, no question about it, and it's a lot of compensation for any CEO. However, I fail to see why baseball players with so-so stats should make more than a guy running something worth as much as all of Major League Baseball combined.
Should they all make a lot less money? Why do I care? If I disagree with ATVI's compensation policies, I'm free to not own the stock (or even buy their products). If I don't like how much the Phillies are paying Cliff Lee, I'm free to never attend their games. And so on and so forth for the rest of the economic sphere of products and services and companies.
2013 Top MLB Player salaries = ~$20MM
2013 Average MLB Player salary = $3.4MM [1]
2012 Minimum MLB Player salary = $480k [2]
Of course, we should probably consider the minor league players:
Minor League AAA Player Salary range: $5k/mo ~ $25k/mo for a 6 month season [3]
-> $30k/yr ~ $150k/yr
So if we suppose that a AAA player gets $100k/yr and a top MLB player gets $20MM/year, then the salary disparity is now 200x, approaching the salary disparity of US corporate employees and their CEOs. That's actually quite a striking similarity!
[1] http://www.cbssports.com/mlb/salaries/avgsalaries
[2] http://www.spotrac.com/terms/mlb/mlb-minimum-salary-69/
[3] http://www.quora.com/How-much-does-the-average-AAA-baseball-...
Except your actions have no impact, they are as effective as those of the "complainers" that you deride and serve the same purpose, namely egocentrism.
The typical rebuttal is that individual actions would make a difference if many people participated in them but this is a counterfactual: They don't, as evidence by the state of the world, and they won't, as evidenced by history.
Most people understand that they suck at pro sports, but they don't understand that they'd suck as CEOs. If I had my druthers everyone would have to start a business as CEO to "graduate". Most would fail horribly, just as most kids fail differential equations. But then they'd know they can't handle the CEO position, just like they know they can't do advanced math or steal second base. And that would drain a lot of the energy out of the idea that CEOs are overpaid.
Name - Lawrence J. Ellison
Size of Option grant in FY09 (Shares) - 7,000,000
Accounting Grant Date Fair Value of Option Grants in FY09 ($) - 78,421,000
Intrinsic Value of FY09 Option Grants as of 5/29/2009 ($) - 0
Intrinsic Value of FY09 Option Grants as of 8/10/2009 ($) - 3,640,000
The disparity between the intrinsic value of the option grants between May and August must mean that the shares increased in value by about $.50 in those ~3 months.
I'm always astonished that Ellison still owns ~24% of Oracle.
Of course Steve Ballmer does even better: 0.029 * $15 billion ($435 million per year)
Turns out there's a massive amount of profit to be had in successful indie games. The distribution channels are spectacular today, from the general Web to Steam to Amazon to Xbox Live etc.
The unintended consequence of charging that much for patches is that simple updates just don't happen, and that everybody gets a lesser game as a result. As much as one would say "get it right the first time", everybody makes mistakes. Thus when it costs $10,000 to fix a save game issue, it's may be a business decision to not patch. Thus, for better games, being in that position shouldn't happen.
And the only other major players are the "addictive but not exactly fun" mould of social gaming companies :(
(I have the pleasure of getting the double whammy of not only reading about the US-based social gaming companies like Zynga et al., but also the Japanese ones such as Gree/DeNA/etc X_X)
Even the new Final Fantasy Tactics S game that was announced is a social game :( http://www.gametrailers.com/side-mission/50952/square-enix-i...
I think that sums it up pretty nicely.
Hey look another reality TV show is starting tonight...
The S&P 500 now gets half of its profits and sales from the rest of the world. The boom in countries like Brazil, China, India etc has vastly expanded the rest of the world's share of the global economy relative to the US. CEO's are compensated for this performance, but labor is paid based on local / domestic factors, not the profit generated in foreign markets.
The CEO wage numbers in the US demonstrate how horribly the US economy has fallen behind when it comes to labor keeping up with global growth. You can easily test this by scaling the corporate sales backwards, eg to the 1960s, and adjusting CEO compensation for inflation.
Everybody likes to talk about worker to CEO pay ratios, but what they never want to talk about is the destruction at the root of the problem: the Fed destroying the US Dollar. CEO pay has kept up, worker pay has not, and the why is easy to understand: the US economy is being flushed down the toilet.
By tapping into global growth, multi-nationals have been able to keep up with the horrific dollar devaluation that has occurred since the 1960s. CEOs are compensated on that basis. Meanwhile labor directly suffers the full intensity of the dollar's destruction. It is thus that the American standard of living has plunged over 50 years. Minimum wage has fallen from $45k to $50k per year ($1.25/hour in 1964, inflation adjusted), down to $14k or so today.
Americans used to be able to more than get by on one income, while a spouse stayed home to raise a family of four. The savings rate was radically higher also.
Fundamentally it's the same reason why wealth can survive inflation, but wages cannot. One can easily be shifted to defensive assets, the other drowns.
Even running just 3% real inflation per year is massively destructive to the standard of living over the course of a single decade. You have to generate 34% wage increases just to tread water.