> Jassy's executive compensation package, which is tied to Amazon stock price and mostly delivered as stock awards over a multi-year period, was $212 million in 2021.
They used "multi-year" here over the actual timeline: 10 years. It sounds a lot less outrageous that his pay is heavily based on the stock price and comes out to be ~21 million a year as the head of one of the largest tech companies in the world.
Here are the details:
> Virtually all of Jassy’s 2021 comp — $211.9 million — was in restricted stock that vests over the next 10 years, according to Amazon’s proxy statement filed Friday. His base salary was $175,000, unchanged from the two prior years; in addition, Amazon paid $589,149 in security expenses for the CEO.
> The Amazon board’s compensation committee said in the filing that it intends for Jassy’s stock award, which vests through 2031, “to serve as a long-term incentive for Mr. Jassy, and, accordingly, believes it should be viewed as compensation over the 10-year term and not solely as compensation for 2021.”
Doesn't sound like he'll get too many more RSUs yearly.
The award is for 61000 shares, which would have been worth $212M as of the 12/31/2021 share price. It's worth far less now.
Quite frankly, this is as sensible of a comp package for a CEO as one could propose. Compensated in primarily in equity with a long horizon for vesting. If a company wanted its executive to be aligned with the interests of its shareholders, is there really a better structure?
Aligning the incentives of the CEO to the incentives of shareholders by awarding the equivalent of an 0.012% ownership stake seems reasonable to me.
That $212 million was starkly contrasted by the next point in the article, that Warehouse workers typically make $15/hr. It would take about 7,000 years working that wage (full-time) to make the same $212,000,000. It's still a _huge_ gulf, whether the CEO's compensation is in one year or one decade.
21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged.
Have you considered that maybe NFL quarterbacks and public company CEOs are both overpaid, but people just like quarterbacks more? After all, I'm pretty sure Aaron Rodgers never laid off nearly 1000 people via a mass Zoom webinar.
> 21 million per year, which wouldn't even make him a top 10 paid NFL quarterback and people are complaining about his pay for running one of the biggest companies in the world. If anything he is underpaid compared to other large tech company CEOs. People really just want to be outraged.
Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! How out of touch with reality are you, if you think that's acceptable for any human to make that kind of money when majority of the world can hardly afford food.
Most of the stuff in the "ethics overhaul" is pie in the sky nonsense.
Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations"
What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?
This is most certainly targeted towards AWS being used by ICE. And not just in a generic way of them hosting ICE servers, but with ICE using Amazon Rekognition to identify undocumented immigrants (and allegedly AWS had meetings with ICE to convince them to use the service). The human rights violations come up when you talk about kids being separated from their families and then straight up lost, and the various other immoral things ICE does.
This isn't something Amazon isn't aware of, I went to the AWS Summit in NYC a few years ago and every few minutes the Keynote got interrupted by another protester yelling "Cut ties with ICE" and getting dragged out of the room. I don't think I was the only one quickly googling on their phones to figure out what they were talking about. I couldn't move my previous company off of AWS, but I moved all my personal servers and I steered my new company away from them.
It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job. Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people, and it is almost impossible for the people to countervail the control authority of the extremely small set of owners who own the majority of voting shares.
Let the justice system crack down on people or organizations "violating human rights" and give companies like Amazon orders to cease service if necessary. Or pass laws to require them to filter some extremely specific use cases, such as the dissemination of child pornography.
Mega corporations shouldn't be the ones deciding what is and is not a socially acceptable activity.
> Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?
There are plenty of organisations trying to do just that. UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, etc. There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.
Like most things in corporate America, you assemble of team and give them the goal of overseeing the due diligence. They won't look too hard so they won't find anything. They're write up how some low friction "solution" that already exists addresses the issue.
Basically, corporate politics as usual - they call the shots, everyone else tows the line, they dress up the results as a win.
How about we start with rape, torture, and murder, and work our way back.
But like really. How do we figure anything out? We work at it, we learn we make mistakes and we grow. It seems like just throwing you're hands up is oppositional to the entire notions of innovation that guide tech companies in the first place.
It's hard but we pay CEO's $21 million dollars a year to do hard things.
Clickbait title, 'nuke ethics overhaul' really means shareholders turn down activist proposal.
And this thread turned into mostly envious ranting pretty fast. A lot of folks aren't even trying to have actual discussions, just mindless ranting past one another, behaving like crabs in a bucket, etc...
It even makes me doubt if it's all organic or if their are paid trolls from competitors as well in the mix.
Considering that Amazon, and Jeff Bezos, are not known to give out lavish comp. packages willy-nilly, it seems like more could be learned investigating why this guy is worth $21 million a year.
[in small text] ignoring that it's almost all stock, vested over 10 years, and pretending we can predict the price of the stock 10 years from now [in large text] Amazon is paying its CEO a salary of $212 MILLION DOLLARS!!!
What I find telling about all of the critiques of CEO pay, billionaire taxation, etc. is that there is almost no discussion of how to get maximum impact for the monies taxed. People don't want to tax Jeff Bezos because they have really great ideas on how to spend public money to achieve great ends -- if they did, they'd be more interested in how to better spend the entire government budget rather than increasing it by fractions of a percentage point.
I have similar qualms about an athlete who nets $46 million per year [1] for shooting balls into a basket. But, then, who am I to decide his "fair" pay? His club obviously thinks he's worth that…
> should ... truly fair ... should be ... acceptable
How do you determine these absolutes? Why is your 'should' and 'fair' set at whatever value you're using, and not whatever value someone else determined?
The only 'fair' is what someone is willing to pay.
If you aren't willing to pay someone 200m... then don't. Why do you care if someone else is willing and does?
> We need hard limits on executive pay because if you adjust every other employees salary at a truly fair rate, Jassy should be lucky to make 10 million a year.
This makes no sense. Why should executive salary be tied or compared to the salary of any other employee role? Should my salary as a dev be a function of what a janitor makes? Should my Manager's salary be tied to my salary? I'm not sure where this idea originally came from but compensation should be based on the value the employee is adding , the rarity of that employee's skills, and how in demand that skill set it, not some arbitrary multiplier of another role's salary. I don't care if a CEO is paid NX the rate of the lowest paid role as long as they are adding value commensurate with their salary. Also, "truly fair rate" according to who, you? What makes you qualified to be the arbiter of corporate compensation?
> There is literally no job on earth that should command this price tag.
The people who have a vested interest in deciding this, namely Amazon shareholders, apparently disagree with you.
There are people, namely Amazon shareholders who are happy to pay that money.
It's a voluntary transaction, there's nothing unfair about it.
People who are not in tech are also shocked to hear about developers salaries. And yet, there's nothing wrong with it, it just means shareholders can (on average and with a certain degree of risk) extract more than that value out of CEOs or engineers. If this wasn't true those companies won't be profitable (if we exclude market distorting forces like government bailouts or regulations that help top companies to maintain their edge).
There's an argument to be made that companies could afford to pay less for these roles and have the same performance - that may very well be true. But this doesn't make it unfair; simply put, the customers (the shareholders) are pooling their money and deciding to shoot for the best of the best by offering the best compensation.
> We need hard limits on executive pay because if you adjust every other employees salary at a truly fair rate, Jassy should be lucky to make 10 million a year.
Fair, by definition, is when the market reaches equilibrium. The shareholders think this is a fair salary. Why is your opinion more valid than theirs? Sure, the salary is high, but it seems commensurate with the value that Amazon generates. Literally 30% of the entire internet runs on AWS, and that's just one part of their business.
Given that Tim Cook earns ~100M yearly, and Satya Nadella is at ~50M yearly, it seems low in comparison.
I agree, and I think the argument "well most of it is stock" is also bullshit. Comp is comp; warehouse workers could be granted RSUs, but they don't (afaik) because reasons. Every dollar he's compensated could be compensation elsewhere. Every share; to someone else.
A classic counter-argument is "well who gets to determine what is fair". I'd counter that with: who determines how much value he, inextricably and uniquely, has added to the company? It's all a farce. No one actually knows (but, oftentimes, the people at the top have bunk reports to justify their position, a privilege line workers don't have).
We need a law which at least begins to lay the foundations for something like: the total all-sources hourly-adjusted compensation for the highest compensated person (employee, contractor, anyone) in any company cannot be more than 1000x the lowest. Regardless of the specifics, the thing I love about that wording is: Amazon absolutely could not afford to pay all of their people $212,000+. But by them saying that, they're in-no-uncertain-terms saying that they're totally unwilling to lower Jassy's comp; drop it to $65M, and now lets try again, can you really not afford to pay everyone at-least $65k? Big Boy Jassy wants a raise, you gotta find the money for everyone; and if you can't, is he really doing that good of a job?
"The talented execs will leave" and go where? Europe? China? Good! The US has massive talent at every traunch of a typical company. Get out! There's dozens of people inside your own company who could do a better job in your seat than you, for a tenth the price, and the only reason they're not sitting there is the gatekeeping every board and exec team participates in to defend their throne.
So Jeff Bezos creating a company that employs people and grows the economy in a non zero sum way through efficiency gains shouldn’t be rewarded billions for the trouble? Why are people so concerned with the salary of the ultra rich? It doesn’t make your life objectively worse, if anything our lives are substantially better because of it, even if you don’t directly shop at Amazon.
its not a "job" it is leadership.. an appropriate analogy is closer to Roman General than school bus driver
within their own circles, competition is fierce.. part of the stature of a modern leader is in the dollar value, much less of the ornamentation and ceremonial weaponry of old.. bankers like it better now
Who determines what fair is? What makes you more well equipped to set the rules here than the market? This isn't a rhetorical question, I'm genuinely curious.
This is a stock grant that vests over 10 years, so averaged out it's 21 million a years. Saying that his salary is 212 million is straight misinformation
The purpose of a company isn't to employ people. It's to take raw inputs, including employee labor, and turn that into outputs that people want. Employee relief comes in the form of voting with their feet or if they're critical inputs into what the black box produces
Stock value depends on growth rate and overall profitability much more than on simply "keeping costs down".
Shareholders invest in Amazon for growth and (now) for profit. Compensating the CEO based on how effectively they deliver that seems like a pretty dang obvious strategy for shareholders to support.
?? There's a handful of people in the world with the level of insight into amazon's internals as Jassy has.
And compared to most in the article, Jassy's comp is very shareholder friendly. He's paid 99% in RSUs - his income already dropped about a third from when the comp was agreed.
[+] [-] ctvo|3 years ago|reply
They used "multi-year" here over the actual timeline: 10 years. It sounds a lot less outrageous that his pay is heavily based on the stock price and comes out to be ~21 million a year as the head of one of the largest tech companies in the world.
Here are the details:
> Virtually all of Jassy’s 2021 comp — $211.9 million — was in restricted stock that vests over the next 10 years, according to Amazon’s proxy statement filed Friday. His base salary was $175,000, unchanged from the two prior years; in addition, Amazon paid $589,149 in security expenses for the CEO.
From Variety https://variety.com/2022/digital/news/amazon-andy-jassy-2021...
Edit:
> The Amazon board’s compensation committee said in the filing that it intends for Jassy’s stock award, which vests through 2031, “to serve as a long-term incentive for Mr. Jassy, and, accordingly, believes it should be viewed as compensation over the 10-year term and not solely as compensation for 2021.”
Doesn't sound like he'll get too many more RSUs yearly.
[+] [-] xiaosun|3 years ago|reply
Quite frankly, this is as sensible of a comp package for a CEO as one could propose. Compensated in primarily in equity with a long horizon for vesting. If a company wanted its executive to be aligned with the interests of its shareholders, is there really a better structure?
Aligning the incentives of the CEO to the incentives of shareholders by awarding the equivalent of an 0.012% ownership stake seems reasonable to me.
[+] [-] Kerrick|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] colechristensen|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] redisman|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] weezin|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] actually_a_dog|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bluetidepro|3 years ago|reply
Or imagine this... they (athletes and CEOs) are ALL grossly overpaid. WOAH!! How out of touch with reality are you, if you think that's acceptable for any human to make that kind of money when majority of the world can hardly afford food.
[+] [-] jaywalk|3 years ago|reply
Take this bullet point: "Whether AWS does due diligence to know if cloud customers are using its services in a way that contributes to human rights violations"
What does that even mean? How could that possibly be accomplished? Who decides what constitutes a "human rights violation" in the first place?
[+] [-] joecot|3 years ago|reply
This isn't something Amazon isn't aware of, I went to the AWS Summit in NYC a few years ago and every few minutes the Keynote got interrupted by another protester yelling "Cut ties with ICE" and getting dragged out of the room. I don't think I was the only one quickly googling on their phones to figure out what they were talking about. I couldn't move my previous company off of AWS, but I moved all my personal servers and I steered my new company away from them.
[+] [-] anonporridge|3 years ago|reply
It's really starting down a bad path when we start asking megacorps to do the government's job. Corporations are fundamentally not subject to the will of the people, and it is almost impossible for the people to countervail the control authority of the extremely small set of owners who own the majority of voting shares.
Let the justice system crack down on people or organizations "violating human rights" and give companies like Amazon orders to cease service if necessary. Or pass laws to require them to filter some extremely specific use cases, such as the dissemination of child pornography.
Mega corporations shouldn't be the ones deciding what is and is not a socially acceptable activity.
[+] [-] sofixa|3 years ago|reply
There are plenty of organisations trying to do just that. UN Human Rights Council, Amnesty International, etc. There's a Universal Declaration of Human Rights that could quite easily be applied as a baseline.
[+] [-] giantg2|3 years ago|reply
Basically, corporate politics as usual - they call the shots, everyone else tows the line, they dress up the results as a win.
[+] [-] mikkergp|3 years ago|reply
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Epistemology
How about we start with rape, torture, and murder, and work our way back.
But like really. How do we figure anything out? We work at it, we learn we make mistakes and we grow. It seems like just throwing you're hands up is oppositional to the entire notions of innovation that guide tech companies in the first place.
It's hard but we pay CEO's $21 million dollars a year to do hard things.
[+] [-] karmasimida|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] MichaelZuo|3 years ago|reply
And this thread turned into mostly envious ranting pretty fast. A lot of folks aren't even trying to have actual discussions, just mindless ranting past one another, behaving like crabs in a bucket, etc...
It even makes me doubt if it's all organic or if their are paid trolls from competitors as well in the mix.
Considering that Amazon, and Jeff Bezos, are not known to give out lavish comp. packages willy-nilly, it seems like more could be learned investigating why this guy is worth $21 million a year.
[+] [-] karaterobot|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mdoms|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] spoonjim|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] re|3 years ago|reply
1) Has the Amazon board ever recommended voting yes on any shareholder proposals?
2) Have any Amazon shareholder proposals ever been approved by investors?
[+] [-] gtvwill|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] skeeter2020|3 years ago|reply
*250K total comp
[+] [-] black_13|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] RONROC|3 years ago|reply
[deleted]
[+] [-] boeingUH60|3 years ago|reply
I have similar qualms about an athlete who nets $46 million per year [1] for shooting balls into a basket. But, then, who am I to decide his "fair" pay? His club obviously thinks he's worth that…
1 - https://hoopshype.com/player/stephen-curry/salary/
[+] [-] chrisseaton|3 years ago|reply
How do you determine these absolutes? Why is your 'should' and 'fair' set at whatever value you're using, and not whatever value someone else determined?
The only 'fair' is what someone is willing to pay.
If you aren't willing to pay someone 200m... then don't. Why do you care if someone else is willing and does?
[+] [-] OminousWeapons|3 years ago|reply
This makes no sense. Why should executive salary be tied or compared to the salary of any other employee role? Should my salary as a dev be a function of what a janitor makes? Should my Manager's salary be tied to my salary? I'm not sure where this idea originally came from but compensation should be based on the value the employee is adding , the rarity of that employee's skills, and how in demand that skill set it, not some arbitrary multiplier of another role's salary. I don't care if a CEO is paid NX the rate of the lowest paid role as long as they are adding value commensurate with their salary. Also, "truly fair rate" according to who, you? What makes you qualified to be the arbiter of corporate compensation?
> There is literally no job on earth that should command this price tag.
The people who have a vested interest in deciding this, namely Amazon shareholders, apparently disagree with you.
[+] [-] jokethrowaway|3 years ago|reply
It's a voluntary transaction, there's nothing unfair about it.
People who are not in tech are also shocked to hear about developers salaries. And yet, there's nothing wrong with it, it just means shareholders can (on average and with a certain degree of risk) extract more than that value out of CEOs or engineers. If this wasn't true those companies won't be profitable (if we exclude market distorting forces like government bailouts or regulations that help top companies to maintain their edge).
There's an argument to be made that companies could afford to pay less for these roles and have the same performance - that may very well be true. But this doesn't make it unfair; simply put, the customers (the shareholders) are pooling their money and deciding to shoot for the best of the best by offering the best compensation.
[+] [-] dvt|3 years ago|reply
Fair, by definition, is when the market reaches equilibrium. The shareholders think this is a fair salary. Why is your opinion more valid than theirs? Sure, the salary is high, but it seems commensurate with the value that Amazon generates. Literally 30% of the entire internet runs on AWS, and that's just one part of their business.
Given that Tim Cook earns ~100M yearly, and Satya Nadella is at ~50M yearly, it seems low in comparison.
[+] [-] 015a|3 years ago|reply
A classic counter-argument is "well who gets to determine what is fair". I'd counter that with: who determines how much value he, inextricably and uniquely, has added to the company? It's all a farce. No one actually knows (but, oftentimes, the people at the top have bunk reports to justify their position, a privilege line workers don't have).
We need a law which at least begins to lay the foundations for something like: the total all-sources hourly-adjusted compensation for the highest compensated person (employee, contractor, anyone) in any company cannot be more than 1000x the lowest. Regardless of the specifics, the thing I love about that wording is: Amazon absolutely could not afford to pay all of their people $212,000+. But by them saying that, they're in-no-uncertain-terms saying that they're totally unwilling to lower Jassy's comp; drop it to $65M, and now lets try again, can you really not afford to pay everyone at-least $65k? Big Boy Jassy wants a raise, you gotta find the money for everyone; and if you can't, is he really doing that good of a job?
"The talented execs will leave" and go where? Europe? China? Good! The US has massive talent at every traunch of a typical company. Get out! There's dozens of people inside your own company who could do a better job in your seat than you, for a tenth the price, and the only reason they're not sitting there is the gatekeeping every board and exec team participates in to defend their throne.
[+] [-] wincy|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] mistrial9|3 years ago|reply
within their own circles, competition is fierce.. part of the stature of a modern leader is in the dollar value, much less of the ornamentation and ceremonial weaponry of old.. bankers like it better now
[+] [-] yowlingcat|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] la6472|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] asdffdsa|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] bitshiftfaced|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] revlolz|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] RONROC|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] xmonkee|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] gepardi|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] vfclists|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] GreenPlastic|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] sokoloff|3 years ago|reply
Shareholders invest in Amazon for growth and (now) for profit. Compensating the CEO based on how effectively they deliver that seems like a pretty dang obvious strategy for shareholders to support.
[+] [-] diob|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] atoav|3 years ago|reply
[+] [-] unknown|3 years ago|reply
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[+] [-] VikingCoder|3 years ago|reply
EDIT: If someone has a more recent, or somehow better, graph than this one [1], then I'm all ears.
[1] : https://slate.com/business/2014/07/ceo-pay-for-performance-t...
[+] [-] MisterPea|3 years ago|reply
And compared to most in the article, Jassy's comp is very shareholder friendly. He's paid 99% in RSUs - his income already dropped about a third from when the comp was agreed.
[+] [-] celeritascelery|3 years ago|reply