this post was submitted on 24 Feb 2024
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Also this scrambling to make Reddit "profitable" and fucking Spez pays himself nearly $200 million a year. Fucking ridiculous. Burn it down. Build something better that hasn't been captured by complete twats.
Nintendo CEO cutting his salary in half to avoid laying off workers after the Wii U fails versus whatever the fuck Reddit is doing
Satoru Iwata was a treasure.
Excuse me, is this for real?
Yup: https://www.cnbc.com/2024/02/13/nintendo-ceo-once-halved-salary-to-prevent-layoffs-why-thats-uncommon.html
How can nintendo ceo be this based
I hate Huffman as much as the next guy, but the $193 million factoid is misleading clickbait nonsense. His actual salary is apparently $400k, the rest is "stock value" or whatever. Reddit is not giving 25% of its yearly revenue to the CEO.
This argument is oft repeated but It's Bullshit. If it wasn't valuable why is Spez okay with it?
Stock grants not being direct Income isn't clickbait nonsense. It's actually DELIBERATE: Spez doesn't pay income taxes on a majority of his income. Capital gains tax has a lot of loopholes that can be exploited.
This just gives spez more money and he can cash out in the IPO.
For anyone that’s fallen for the “{wealthy person} doesn’t actually have ${huge number} because it’s stock” thing, here’s how it works.
You might be wondering, why do they get this cheap credit? Because it’s a very safe bet for the financial institute, they are acting as a sort of time arbitrage mechanism for the person they are extending credit to. Since they perform this function they can be relatively assured that this will allow their client to sell their stocks, not because they have to cover expenses, but because capital gains protections and the market is favorable. It also aids in fostering a positive relationship with someone with a lot of wealth which is something financial institutes have an interest in doing.
All the actors are doing what’s in their rational self-interest. The end result is that Spez can access a large part of that $200M as liquid cash right now through credit with one hand and with the other wave you off and say “those are stocks I actually only got paid $400k”
How do they pay back those low-interest loans? I’ve always been curious.
Eventually they do need to pay back the loan, the low interest rates just make it so that they can choose to sell their stocks in the most favorable way.
This is why it makes sense for the financial institute to give out the loan in the first place.
So here’s the scenario. Let’s say you wake up tomorrow and somehow find yourself with $200M worth of stock. You are now “worth” $200M so you’d like to start living like it! You want to go buy a mansion and a nice new car and a private chef. Problem is, none of those people take stock, they all want money.
Goldman Sachs goes, “hey, I’ll loan you the money really cheap, you have to pay me back with interest, but since you have $200M in stock you can sell some of that later and pay me back”
This is great for you because you get to enjoy the mansion and new car and private chef right now. If you sold the stock right now you’d get taxed as if it were income at 38% but if you hold the stock for a few years when you sell it it will be considered capital gains and only taxed at 10% (or 15%, whichever the rate is). In addition, you don’t have to go to the stock market and sell for whatever they want right now, you can wait until the value of your stock is really high and selling is very advantageous for you.
So you do have to pay back the money, but this is still a really sweet deal because you can enjoy all the nice things right now and you get to avoid that extra ~30% you would pay in taxes if you sold it right now.
As long as the amount you saved in taxes outweighs the amount you pay in interest, this is a great deal for you. And for the financial institute it’s low risk (they extended you $10M backed by $200M in assets) and when you repay they make back enough in interest to make it worthwhile.
You get more money in your pocket, the bank gets more money in its pocket, from their point of view this was a win win. The losers are the market suffering a higher price for the stock because the supply was artificially constrained by you having access to this credit (otherwise you’d have sold shares to buy a mansion and nice car and private chef) and the taxpayer who was to shoulder a heavy tax burden because you converted your income into capital gains.
The one thing that definitely isn’t happening is Bezos or Musk or any of these other “they are only rich on paper” people clipping coupons to make ends meet. They live like rich people because the have access to plenty of money secured by their less liquid assets
This was a very informative read I understand things better now. Thanks!
Almost always executive compensation is partly stock. That doesn’t change the fact that he was compensated that much. You can’t say Elon Musk isn’t worth 200b$ because it’s not liquid.
I mean, you could say that because it's just an estimate of what his assets are worth using the current valuations of his holdings. It's more of a statistical average of what he could be worth then a concrete value. You can't know the actual value unless someone makes an offer and it's accepted. If he's feeling pressure to sell, it will be lower than that. If he isn't, it will be higher than that.
Whole Wall Street is built upon this “estimation” idea. No reason to nitpick about it when it comes to executive compensation.
Huffman's wages of $193 million per year is absurd. That's double what Tim Apple makes. It's almost 4x what Microsoft's CEO, Satya Nadella, makes, and 4x what Netflix's CEO, Reed Hastings, makes. During the writer's strike a big deal was made over David Zaslav's compensation, but even that's not as much as Huffman makes.
Imagine they reduced Steve Huffman's wages by $100 million per year. For that much, they could give the top 10,000 moderators $10,000 each per year. For some, that might not match the work they put in, but it would sure be a nice gesture, and would make them feel like the work they were doing was appreciated. Meanwhile, Huffman would still be one of the highest paid CEOs in the world.
P.S. stop saying "spez", the guy has a real life name, and that real life name should be the one that's tarnished.
Steve Huffman fucks underage goats.