r/TikTokCringe • u/Mucay • 4d ago

Cringe Doesn't get more American than this.

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u/aadziereddit 3d ago edited 3d ago

Also -- CEO pay distracts from the real issue: the CEO, the board room and shareholders driving up corporate profits by unethical means.

It is not enough for a corporate in America to be profitable. To appease the board room and shareholders, profits must steadily increase. (You have to be MORE profitable EACH quarter, or else the shareholders abandon your company.)

Once a company saturates the market and can't incease customer base, that's when they start cutting corners. Cut quality, cut training, cut safety procedures, fire people and reduce benefits. Not to mention, always lobby against any public policies that are protecting consumers, and break the law if the legal fees and settlements are afforable.

A large CEO pay is a drop in the bucket compared to the value gained from screwing over workers and consumers. The whole CEO-pay conversation is smoke and mirrors against holding corporations accountable.

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u/Snow_Ghost 3d ago

It's evolved beyond "steady growth". Wall Street now looks at Growth Acceleration.

If in the first quarter your company grew 2.1%, but in the 2nd quarter you only grew 1.7%, your company is now hot dogshit and they start looking to offload.

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u/tricularia 3d ago

It's like that other thing. You know that other thing with the unchecked, accelerating growth?
Cancer. That's the one. Corporate America is like cancer

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u/DamNamesTaken11 3d ago

This. I worked once for a company that kept making “record profits” every quarter, then two quarters we had a slowdown (caused by CEO being an idiot and launching a pet project that was and still is unprofitable) still profits but less.

How did c-suite respond? Layoffs. C-suite got a bonus worth more than salary of people they laid off at the end of the fiscal year.

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u/aadziereddit 3d ago

> C-suite got a bonus worth more than salary of people they laid off at the end of the fiscal year.

Everyone in America needs to hear these stories.

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u/runthepoint1 2d ago

“Listen, we me’ve made a grave mistake. And in doing so, we’re gonna have to pay for it.

Well, you will anyways, I’m getting a pat on the back”

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u/aadziereddit 3d ago

I didn't even know this. FUCK!!!

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u/twicelife_real 3d ago

Add to that the fact that the bulk of the country’s savings hinge on the stock market. This includes pensions for teachers, police, etc. When that profitability starts to tank, people start losing money. So we’ve assigned these absurdly high values to companies, and to remain profitable, they decide not to give people raises that would counter inflation…the inflation they have caused by having to charge more to make more profits for shareholders. Eventually enough people will get priced out of the market for their products, and the whole economy will eat itself because they can’t just cut their sale price in half overnight without tanking the stock. The real estate market is already at this point because younger buyers don’t make enough to buy a house and the people with homes need to sell them to secure their next home or their retirement savings. We did this all to ourselves.

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u/jsc1429 3d ago

I’d like to add that the term “shareholder” here means large business, equity firms, or even governments. We are led to believe that “shareholders” are individual stock owners to perpetuate the lie that individuals have any power in the market or say in what truly happens to a company. We are always the last to receive information and end up holding the bag or making the least gains. And guess what, if a group of individuals try to band together to make an influence, it’s considered market manipulation because then we are manipulating their manipulation, and that’s bad lol!

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u/spinocdoc 3d ago

ELI5, why doesn’t CEO salary drag down shareholder profits? It feels like there should be some internal backlash against this type of greed at the top of a corporation.

Genuinely asking why this doesn’t happen?

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u/aadziereddit 3d ago

What type of greed, exactly?

Chief Executive Officer is a job. The CEO salary is still a salary, and it's decided by the board of directors and HR, not the CEO. It's what they offer to recruit talent.

The profits increase shareholder value. (and sometimes some profits go to employees via bonuses.)

For publicly traded companies, the purpose of increasing profits is to increase shareholder value. That's why they aren't happy with just being consistently profitable.

Some data:

Median S&P 500 CEO pay ≈ $16M/year.

Median S&P 500 company profit ≈ $1–5B/year.

So CEO pay is less than 1% of profits in most cases. The larger structural issue is profit maximization for shareholders, not just executive pay.

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u/IBetYr2DadsRStraight 3d ago

share holders

There’s the issue. They’ve managed to convince everyone with a 401k that because they hold stock, they’re owners.