First things first: if you're going to do math, why not do it right? Using the figures provided in the sory, $31 million in compensation last year for Dimon and a $16.50-an-hour entry level wage at Chase, yields a 969-to -1 ratio, not 368-to-1. Maybe Dimon makes 368 times as much as someone who draws a yearly salary at chase instead of an hourly wage: an entry-level executive with an MBA from Harvard or Princeton. $31 divided by 368 is a little under $85,000, which sounds like it might be the starting pay at Chase for such an MBA. The Yahoo! story doesn't provide info about those starting salaries.
Starting pay at Tesla is as low as $16 an hour. As I've mentioned so often recently in this blog that some might think I'm unhealthily obsessed, Elon Musk made $2.6 billion last year. That's well over 80,000 times as much as the person making $16 an hour. Yes -- Tesla is reducing the world's carbon emissions, and, yes, that's extremely important and good. But so are a lot of other companies whose CEO's don't make 80,000 times their entry-level pay.
Maybe you don't believe me when I say that it doesn't bother me that Elon Musk is so rich. Okay, it bothers me a little when I look into the details. But what bothered me and occasioned me to write this blog post is the complaints about the CEO salaries at large banks, when 9 out the top 10 highest-earning CEO's aren't working at any sort of financial institution. What bothers me is the widespread fixation on the earnings of banking executives when other executives are earning much more. I'm using "earning' here in the sense of "being paid," with no connotation of deserving or being fair. In case you still haven't noticed: the world's not fair.
And by the way: no, Elon Musk isn't the world's wealthiest CEO. Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon, made $40 billion in 2018. If we assume that Bezos works an 80-hour week, that means he made about as much in 3 hours as Jamie Dimon made in 2018. Starting pay at Amazon: $11 an hour.
Like I said: if you're going to do math, why not do it right?
No comments:
Post a Comment