This is a lot any way you look at it, but before everyone jumps in to compare to other things, it's worth noting that this was agreed 10 years ago, and the value is down to two things: 1) hitting targets that earned him this amount, and 2) the amount being in terms of shares, not dollar value, which he has essentially 10x'd the value of in his tenure.
If Apple had not roughly 10x'd in value over the last decade this would be a ~75m payout, and that's not even accounting for the fact that a lot of this was likely tied to increasing the share price.
It's an obscene amount of money, but it's not today's Apple giving Tim Cook $750m, it's 2011's Apple agreeing to give him 5m shares if he did well.
Edit: Misread the article, "191.83% over the last three years"!
I think you can say that about anyone who makes anything based on work from anyone else. While it's important to recognise those others (as those at Apple with stock based compensation have been), I don't think it nullifies the point because they didn't do all the work themselves.
Sort of like how Michael Jordan's teammates helped him in the Bulls. But you would be a damn fool to not pay him to ensure that he doesn't go anywhere.
So many sour comments. When Tim Cook took the place of the legendary you know who, every reviewers is worried about Apple's future, and Tim's not doing a so bad job after all. Most of his investments paid off, and Apple's performance has remained stable and has grown.
Tim deserves credit for running such an successful operation. Do you really think those running-up phone makers aren't looking for someone like Tim? The competition in the phone market is real.
Although we could also argue Tim failed in a way with the rise of Huawei and Xiaomi where we had to block the competitors via 'national security' concerns.
IMO: he’s doing an awful job. His mismanagement of iOS will result in regulation that forces them to give up the abuses which made it (and by extension Apple) so profitable.
From the article :
"In 2015, Mr Cook said he would give away his entire fortune before he dies, and is known to have donated tens of millions of dollars to charity".
Success during one's life , paying it back to make the society a better place once gone. Take a bow, Mr Cook. What more can one ask for in a lifetime :)
And during his lifetime, this money is locked away, only accessible by him, taken out of circulation and thereby not adding any worth against ever-growing inequality, supporting economic prosperity or tax-funded investments.
This is just once again a case of philanthropic green-washing of what should be actually simply heavily taxed.
He is only making society better if the value he is creating is larger than the value he is extracting.
You can build a regular home, get paid $5 million for it, the net act was probably negative for the system.
It's the same for companies turning profits: it's entirely possible to make profits in a system while actually shrinking the overall pie. This is common when certain activities are externalized (i.e. pollution).
Capitalism, broadly, does create a bigger pie, but it's a very uneven process and the true value creation doesn't always happen where the value is created. Value capture happens where the power is.
Rich people spend money on charities they like. They change society the way they want it to change that does not necessarily make society a better place nor is it necessarily what most people want.
If he had to pay all of this on taxes, society could decide how to use that money and it would be just as much, if not more "a better place".
Why does everyone think that they know better how to spend other people's money than the people who have earned it?
Somehow the people who didn't have the intelligence and discipline to spend decades successfully doing things that make them rich are so sure that they would be able to do better with their (totally hypothetical) wealth than the people who did.
Everyone loves to claim some kind of moral superiority over the billionaires, but I don't see these critics spending a significant portion of their wealth on charity.
Why this criticism? Is HIV research not a good enough cause for you? Much better than a 10 billion dollar airport or 15 billion dollar Olympics in my opinion.
What is the point of grabbing surpluses and then handing them back?
Re: the note above about Foxconn workers, Cooks money comes from the market power developed by Apple which they can leverage on everyone in the system, consumers, workers, suppliers, distributors etc..
So he can leverage against Foxconn workers and then give $1B to charity - or he could not leverage, and double Foxconn workers wages. And that's just his comp, not everything else.
Now - maybe there is a theoretical greater efficiency in his charity work, and of course it's spent on 'his interests' not others, etc..
But the notion of 'giving it away' doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless that giving is frankly more effective than otherwise.
I think Gates Foundation for example is reasonable - a lot of philanthropy is effective in ways that governments and regular private corps are not - that makes sense.
But from a purely charitable perspective, it does seem a little bit odd to accumulate in one column on the ledger in order to put it back in the other column.
> In 2015, Mr Cook said he would give away his entire fortune before he dies, and is known to have donated tens of millions of dollars to charity.
I'm normally a proponent of reducing income inequality. But this has got me thinking. Is the world actively better off when billionaires like Cook/Gates/Buffett make a ton of money.
Consider the alternative: someone in the 75th percentile of USA income gets a fat raise. Most of this money is spent on a nicer house, a nicer car, eating out, going on vacation, etc. Contrast this against a billionaire who has signed the giving pledge. They spend a small fraction of this money on themselves. And the majority ends up going to charitable causes such as educational initiatives, HIV research, deworming, clean drinking water, etc.
Ironically, big payouts (and tax breaks) for billionaires* would do more to help the needy, compared to raises for the upper-middle-class.
*This only applies to those billionaires who have committed to donating most of their wealth of course
> The problem is, many of those people also burn money for yachts and spaceships.
Sure, but upper-middle-class people also burn money on upscale housing/food/travel etc. The main difference is that billionaires who've signed the giving pledge give a much larger fraction of their income and wealth to causes that help the needy.
Also, it seems odd to lump together spaceships with yachts. When anti-intellectuals attack government funding for NASA, we're the first to defend NASA and all the beneficial progress that comes out of funding cutting edge engineering projects. It's disingenuous to then attack people like Bezos when they do the same thing with their own money.
> Plus, to me all this charity stuff seems like a buyout. Gates basically made the world a worse place, before he started to make it better.
Maybe. I'm certainly not saying that billionaires should be given tax breaks because of their virtuous character. Just pointing out that the needy might ironically be best served by a billionaire tax cut.
The world can end up better off in certain cases of one person controlling huge amounts of resources rather than collectively deciding what to do with them.
But if you think that's always going to be the case, why bother having democracies then? We can return to the tradition of noblesse oblige and let kings and lords take all the products of everyone else's labor and just hope that they'll feel sufficiently obligated to be kind and charitable to the rest of us. There are plenty of people who believe this, so you won't be alone, and I'm sure others will argue we're better off now that the men being rewarded by being allowed to own everything got there by being good at product design and regulatory capture rather than past centuries when they were good at raising armies and taking land from other people.
There’s nothing preventing “someone in the 75th percentile of USA income” from signing that pledge, is there?
Also, why would one assume billionaires are better at judging what’s good for society than, say, elected officials or people currently making peanuts working in Amazon warehouses?
One could argue that the bubble billionaires live in is further separated from society at large than that of those people.
Option A) The money is taxed and spent on HIV research.
Option B) He retires and (maybe) gives it to support HIV research.
So the question is, interest and efficiency.
It's possible in may situations for charitable giving to have greater efficiency, by leveraging the knowledge of the investor, directing the money towards really effective outcomes. Or not. Then there is the public interest.
Option C) Reduce the market power of monopolizing entities, in which case instead of gigantic profits accumulating in specific centres, you have workers, suppliers and consumers getting a better deal across the board i.e. Foxconn staff having more income, consumers getting better prices etc..
I like Option C.
I like Option B when there's effective leadership.
I like Option A when governments are really smart with their investment or redistribution.
I see your point and I somewhat agree. But this is based on the assumption that only upper-middle-class engineers work for Apple.
However, the people in factories producing these products for Apple definitely deserve a raise. Income inequality should be fixed throughout the supply chain and not only benefit the upper-middle-class.
How did billionaires amass that much riches? How much environmental distrution, erosion of democracy and workers rights, and general negativity brought them up to this level? Giving back a few million to the community does not offset that.
When will the people understand, that if you force the equality, it'll result in mediocrity?
USSR has learned this lesson the hard way, so it is sad to see how many well-off Americans a rushing head first into it voluntarily?
Trust me, you won't like the results. You have a 200square meters house? Nobody needs that many space, and also there are so many homeless in Los Angeles. You take two rooms 24square meters each, and the rest of the house would be distributed among the needy.
Do you like this perspective? This was the first thing done when Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, I'm not kidding. All in the name of equality.
Is it possible to have a debate about CEO payout without the dumb comparisons with the Soviet Union?
Imperial Russia was an absolutist autocracy in theory for most of its history and in practice for all of it. Does being against despotism mean that I have to give a couple rooms from the property I don't own?
No, because when you appeal to how unjust it is for CEO to be paid much more than workers from a factory, you are repeating the key piece of Bolshevik propaganda.
IIRC there are places (Japan?) where it had historically been considered more unseemly for CEOs to get paid so much more than everyone else below them. But there’s no law of nature that says low performance goes with that.
Readit News
If Apple had not roughly 10x'd in value over the last decade this would be a ~75m payout, and that's not even accounting for the fact that a lot of this was likely tied to increasing the share price.
It's an obscene amount of money, but it's not today's Apple giving Tim Cook $750m, it's 2011's Apple agreeing to give him 5m shares if he did well.
Edit: Misread the article, "191.83% over the last three years"!
Apple is worth about 11x what it was worth 10 years ago.
Think there might have been one or two other people involved in that. Maybe even a few more than that.
Tim deserves credit for running such an successful operation. Do you really think those running-up phone makers aren't looking for someone like Tim? The competition in the phone market is real.
Although we could also argue Tim failed in a way with the rise of Huawei and Xiaomi where we had to block the competitors via 'national security' concerns.
Success during one's life , paying it back to make the society a better place once gone. Take a bow, Mr Cook. What more can one ask for in a lifetime :)
This is just once again a case of philanthropic green-washing of what should be actually simply heavily taxed.
Not being snarky but heavily taxed and then what? Expect the government to make the best decision on how to spend money?
Deleted Comment
At least there is a chance it goes somewhere good now.
You can build a regular home, get paid $5 million for it, the net act was probably negative for the system.
It's the same for companies turning profits: it's entirely possible to make profits in a system while actually shrinking the overall pie. This is common when certain activities are externalized (i.e. pollution).
Capitalism, broadly, does create a bigger pie, but it's a very uneven process and the true value creation doesn't always happen where the value is created. Value capture happens where the power is.
If he had to pay all of this on taxes, society could decide how to use that money and it would be just as much, if not more "a better place".
Somehow the people who didn't have the intelligence and discipline to spend decades successfully doing things that make them rich are so sure that they would be able to do better with their (totally hypothetical) wealth than the people who did.
Everyone loves to claim some kind of moral superiority over the billionaires, but I don't see these critics spending a significant portion of their wealth on charity.
Re: the note above about Foxconn workers, Cooks money comes from the market power developed by Apple which they can leverage on everyone in the system, consumers, workers, suppliers, distributors etc..
So he can leverage against Foxconn workers and then give $1B to charity - or he could not leverage, and double Foxconn workers wages. And that's just his comp, not everything else.
Now - maybe there is a theoretical greater efficiency in his charity work, and of course it's spent on 'his interests' not others, etc..
But the notion of 'giving it away' doesn't make a whole lot of sense unless that giving is frankly more effective than otherwise.
I think Gates Foundation for example is reasonable - a lot of philanthropy is effective in ways that governments and regular private corps are not - that makes sense.
But from a purely charitable perspective, it does seem a little bit odd to accumulate in one column on the ledger in order to put it back in the other column.
Compared to the total value of the company, if anything it seems small.
I'm normally a proponent of reducing income inequality. But this has got me thinking. Is the world actively better off when billionaires like Cook/Gates/Buffett make a ton of money.
Consider the alternative: someone in the 75th percentile of USA income gets a fat raise. Most of this money is spent on a nicer house, a nicer car, eating out, going on vacation, etc. Contrast this against a billionaire who has signed the giving pledge. They spend a small fraction of this money on themselves. And the majority ends up going to charitable causes such as educational initiatives, HIV research, deworming, clean drinking water, etc.
Ironically, big payouts (and tax breaks) for billionaires* would do more to help the needy, compared to raises for the upper-middle-class.
*This only applies to those billionaires who have committed to donating most of their wealth of course
Sure thing.
The problem is, many of those people also burn money for yachts and spaceships.
Plus, to me all this charity stuff seems like a buyout. Gates basically made the world a worse place, before he started to make it better.
Sure, but upper-middle-class people also burn money on upscale housing/food/travel etc. The main difference is that billionaires who've signed the giving pledge give a much larger fraction of their income and wealth to causes that help the needy.
Also, it seems odd to lump together spaceships with yachts. When anti-intellectuals attack government funding for NASA, we're the first to defend NASA and all the beneficial progress that comes out of funding cutting edge engineering projects. It's disingenuous to then attack people like Bezos when they do the same thing with their own money.
> Plus, to me all this charity stuff seems like a buyout. Gates basically made the world a worse place, before he started to make it better.
Maybe. I'm certainly not saying that billionaires should be given tax breaks because of their virtuous character. Just pointing out that the needy might ironically be best served by a billionaire tax cut.
But if you think that's always going to be the case, why bother having democracies then? We can return to the tradition of noblesse oblige and let kings and lords take all the products of everyone else's labor and just hope that they'll feel sufficiently obligated to be kind and charitable to the rest of us. There are plenty of people who believe this, so you won't be alone, and I'm sure others will argue we're better off now that the men being rewarded by being allowed to own everything got there by being good at product design and regulatory capture rather than past centuries when they were good at raising armies and taking land from other people.
Also, why would one assume billionaires are better at judging what’s good for society than, say, elected officials or people currently making peanuts working in Amazon warehouses?
One could argue that the bubble billionaires live in is further separated from society at large than that of those people.
Option B) He retires and (maybe) gives it to support HIV research.
So the question is, interest and efficiency.
It's possible in may situations for charitable giving to have greater efficiency, by leveraging the knowledge of the investor, directing the money towards really effective outcomes. Or not. Then there is the public interest.
Option C) Reduce the market power of monopolizing entities, in which case instead of gigantic profits accumulating in specific centres, you have workers, suppliers and consumers getting a better deal across the board i.e. Foxconn staff having more income, consumers getting better prices etc..
I like Option C.
I like Option B when there's effective leadership.
I like Option A when governments are really smart with their investment or redistribution.
USSR has learned this lesson the hard way, so it is sad to see how many well-off Americans a rushing head first into it voluntarily?
Trust me, you won't like the results. You have a 200square meters house? Nobody needs that many space, and also there are so many homeless in Los Angeles. You take two rooms 24square meters each, and the rest of the house would be distributed among the needy.
Do you like this perspective? This was the first thing done when Bolsheviks came to power in Russia, I'm not kidding. All in the name of equality.
Imperial Russia was an absolutist autocracy in theory for most of its history and in practice for all of it. Does being against despotism mean that I have to give a couple rooms from the property I don't own?
IIRC there are places (Japan?) where it had historically been considered more unseemly for CEOs to get paid so much more than everyone else below them. But there’s no law of nature that says low performance goes with that.
You should see what some states have done in the name of freedom and democracy elsewhere