par for course as member of obscene 1% club
http://www.bbc.com/capital/story/20190108-how-long-it-takes-a-ceo-to-earn-more-than-you-do-in-a-year
Some of these comments are so tragically naive. Your primary care physician, the partners at your accounting firm or maybe your lawyer are the people most likely to be part of this “nefarious” 1% club. Tim Cook belongs, in many ways, to a 1 in 7 billion club, having led a company to become the first to be publicly valued at one trillion dollars. (Who cares if it’s not worth exactly that much right now, that’s not the point.) In terms of intellect and ability, only one male or female like him is born for every 10,000 people (likely higher). That just is what it is. The ultimate lottery is the one you don’t actually play, at the moment of your birth. Given husband talent, ambition and everything else he was lucky enough to achieve, should he really be making what Bob down at the auto shop is making, Lear we live in an unfair, unjust and cruel society? If you want to be completely pedantic about it, then I think it’s fair that he earns more than, say, every 9,999 people. You can do the math if you want that number. Or, if you’re Tim Cook you probably did it in your head before finishing the sentence. It’s odd to me that people simply cannot accept *anything* that falls more than one or two standard deviations outside their tiny slice of human experience.
Given the value that Tim Cook has contributed at Apple—keeping in mind that simply not sinking the ship, or keeping in on a steady course is of massive value by itself—an annual salary of less than $20 million dollars is absolutely nothing.
If you want to feel righteously judgemental, try and find the very well hidden executives who lead corporations that engage in the international arms trade, or in mercenary contract work. Or fracking. There are people out there making a **** ton more than Tim, doing things so horrific they pay 10’a of millions just to keep it all out of the press. In fact, we won’t know about a lot of what these completely amoral/immoral f***s are doing until 100’s or 1,000’s of people start dying in specific communities for “no reason.” Or an obscure Top Secret internal government report ties the illegal sale of arms by a greedy U.S. corporation (guided by a small, brutally profit-driven team) to a “terrorist group” that went on to murder 20,000 (or so) people during a conflict like the current Saudi-Yemeni s***show.
I know it’s tempting to want to publicly stone Tom Cook since he’s made “so much money!” but keep in mind that of all of those making serious money like that, he’s not a bad guy. (As far as I know—plus, I don’t think he has the time to be truly evil anyway.)